Damaged still image from a 1987 film by Victor Kyzyma (damage caused by agricultural lime), Urban Media Archive, Center for Urban History of East Central Europe
Inviting Interventions:
Healing and Haunting Practices Around Contamination
Click this link to join: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88104287431
Meeting ID: 881 0428 7431
Boi Huyen Ngo introduces research into the colonial legacies of the highly toxic herbicide, Agent Orange* - the continual contaminations of landscapes, communities and bodies, before inviting you to join collective embodied interventions for healing and haunting practices in the aftermaths of chemical contamination.
Going beyond understanding of medicine and public health, Boi Huyen Ngo’s research looks into care-driven community practices for healing and reconnecting to cultural landscapes. It adopts storytelling as a means to decolonise contamination and find alternative methods to better acknowledge and heal affected communities in both Vietnam and Australia. Boi Huyen Ngo explores diasporic and Indigenous understandings and story-telling practices around Agent Orange. Through this, she will invite you to review your own practice (art, writing, activism and more) and explore the possibilites of collectively creating an ethos for embodied engagement with contaminated landscapes.
* Agent Orange is a herbicide and defoliant chemical that is widely known for its use by the U.S. military as part of its herbicidal warfare program during the Vietnam War from 1961 to 1971.
About Boi Huyen Ngo
Boi Huyen Ngo’s (she/her) works explores Vietnamese migration and incorporates Aboriginal Australian and Vietnamese knowledge and storytelling in the attempt to decolonize knowledge and histories of Vietnam and Australia. She has worked teaching and guest lecturing for 5 years in the University of Technology Sydney and currently works as a youth worker.
This event is one of a series organised alongside Residency 21, Nature Scribbles and Flesh Reads. The residency proposes a process of collective research into intertwined relationships between body and environment, seeking to understand ways in which contaminating toxins cut through lands and bodies.
Inviting interventions is held in collaboration with artist Kajsa Dahlberg; The Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm; and Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation.
