FEB RUARY — MARCH

I was interested in finding moments of solidarity between the colonized – I was doing research on French colonial soldiers called tirailleurs: tirailleurs sénégalais (French colonial soldiers from West Africa) and tirailleurs indochinois (French colonial soldiers from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia) specifically. What solidarities had arisen on the battlefield between these colonial soldiers that had come to the aid of France during WWI and WWII but then were pitted against one another when the uprising against France began in Vietnam in the 1940’s?

I had heard that there was a Vietnamese community in Senegal. I had read something about a Vietnamese dish called ‘nem’ being popular in Dakar and it struck a chord of curiosity. There was an impression that it was a community that goes back a while, but I didn’t know the extent of it. I started traveling to Dakar for research and through friends, started meeting people from the Vietnamese-Senegalese community. As I got to know the different members of the community there, I was blown away by the breadth of their experiences, their stories and their resilience. Our discussions continued which led to me making an immersive 4-channel video installation that explores their stories.

How does storytelling factor into how you present histories from these communities?

Stories are such powerful devices. They can be designed and instrumentalized by those in power to control and oppress, or conversely, used by the oppressed to resist and empower themselves. Stories help us hold onto hope. Stories and the telling of stories is a way for memory and history to be transmitted from one generation to another. We define ourselves through the stories we tell. For communities, like the Vietnamese-Senegalese community in Senegal, who have arisen from a very chaotic moment in history and a migration that was essentially a series of ruptures, both socially and personally, storytelling not only becomes a way to reify one’s sense of belonging in a space, but it also helps to fill in the gaps cause by personal or political erasures.

An aspect of your filmmaking is “creating memory”, can you speak to the importance of that act - both in terms of what it has meant to you as an artist and in a broader political sense?

I think there has been an overall sense of helplessness, especially amongst immigrant and refugee communities all over the world, over the last century - known as the century of refugees. So much of official history has been designed to negate lives and bodies and other memories – memories that did not work towards colonial profit and extractivism. The colonial project specifically was a calculated process of exploiting, of killing, of negating, of erasing. I’ve realized that the imagination expressed through storytelling, specifically storytelling that works towards filling these gaps, of producing or “creating memory”, could be such a strong tool for healing those wounds.