Tuan Andrew Nguyen: Crimes of Solidarity / Crimes de Solidarité
Manifesta 13 Biennale: Traits d’union.s
2020
Manifesta 13 Biennale: Traits d’union.s
2020
Production | Acquisition Grant
Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s silent film for Manifesta 13 examines how we hear others and tell our own stories. A ‘crime of solidarity’ is an informal term that human rights advocates use to denounce the criminalization of assistance given to undocumented migrants in France. In the face of this state prohibition against caregiving and solidarity, Nguyen’s project shows how memory and voice can be used to resist erasure and disposability. Crimes of Solidarity / Crimes de Solidarité was made in collaboration with the former tenants of Squat Saint-Just, a temporary housing shelter for undocumented migrants that unexpectedly caught fire shortly before its tenants were evicted and displaced to other temporary housing in Marseille. The film’s viewing experience was further activated in Marseilles by migrant co-authors/actors performing the missing dialogue live in the exhibition space. Each actor synced their voices to their own image onscreen, while the act of remembering and retelling reframes their relationship to their own stories. As they perform themselves again and again, their identities fade in and out of focus, shifting between embodiment and disembodiment as they take narrative control of their own migration stories.
Founded in the early 1990s, Manifesta is the European Nomadic Biennial dedicated to rethinking the relation between culture and society. The biennial investigates and catalyzes positive social change through contemporary culture in response to and in close dialogue with the social sphere of the host cities and their communities, which rotate each year. For its thirteenth edition in 2020, Manifesta took place in Marseille, France. The biennial was divided into three different, yet connected, programs: the central exhibition program, Traits d’union.s (featuring Nguyen’s Crimes of Solidarity), the Education and Mediation program, Le Tiers Programme, and the collateral projects and events, Les Parallèles du Sud (with more than 80 projects in the Région Sud).
For more information, visit Manifesta 13.
Images: Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Crimes of Solidarity / Crimes de Solidarité, 2020. Two-channel video installation and performance. Photos by Anais Baseilhac & VOST Collectif.
