The Way We Walk
Extract from The Way We Walk, 2020.
Scroll further down for exhibition view.
Extract from The Way We Walk, 2020.
Scroll further down for exhibition view.
Premiere: Friday 7 August 2020, 6pm
la rada, via della Morettina 2, Locarno, Switzerland – www.larada.ch
8 August - 12 September 2020.
Do Vietnamese people walk differently? This is the absurd question that triggered The Way We Walk, a film made in Saigon, Vietnam, and across its Mekong region. Committed to the commonality of the act of walking, participants subject themselves to interviews whilst being made to walk on a treadmill. They come up with preposterous theories and anecdotes in response to this strange torturing technique, demonstrating their love for the nation as they discuss the implications of regional politics. The Way We Walk’s main character is a treadmill that offers itself as a surface for projection, a machine to tell stories; a Trojan horse to question the policies of censorship.
Les vietnamiens marchent-ils différemment ? C’est la question absurde et le point de départ de The Way We Walk, réalisé à Saigon et sa région au sud du Vietnam. Les participants se livrent à une mystérieuse action commune en acceptant d’être interviewés tandis qu’ils marchent sur un tapis de course. Leurs témoignages oscillent entre théories abracadabrantes et anecdotes comme pour montrer leur patriotisme sans résister à pointer du doigt les dysfonctionnements de la politique régionale.Le personnage principal de The Way We Walk est un tapis de course, une surface de projection, une machine à raconter des histoires et un cheval de Troie pour défier la censure.
For the solo show titled Cách Mình Đi Bộ, a Vietnamese sentence that translates to “The Way We Walk”, Nicolas Cilins worked with his co-conspirator Dustin Đức Thịnh Dương, who is a young Australian man of Vietnamese descent. They travelled together to Vietnam where Dương hadn’t visited for over 10 years, in order to explore the distance between his fantasy of the motherland and the multiple realities of a developing nation. There, relatives pointed out to Dương that he does not walk like a Vietnamese person, making justifications for their observations. It was from this discussion that the absurd question arose: do Vietnamese people really walk differently? This “research question” became the scope and terms of reference for the project, allowing the pair to probe into the grey area between science, culture, and ethnography.
Cilins and Dương ordered a foldable walking machine from China, on which Dương’s family and passers-by were asked to walk and answer questions. Discussions about walking and cultural differences gradually thicken and become entangled in spontaneous and controversial narratives, leading to revelations about the Dương family history, Vietnamese politics, collective identity, and national epistemology. The temptation for the interlocutors to deviate from the pseudo-scientific purpose of answering the incongruous and innocuous question that sparked the project was too strong: it’s often forbidden to talk explicitly about political issues in Vietnam, like it is in China. Yet, the machine started to function as a Hansard, drawing out and recording individual confidences within a country whose citizens usually shy away from explicit and critical speech. The result are candid and frank divulgences from both personal and ideological perspectives, underscored by the apparatus of the walking machine, a recording device, as it makes its laborious filmic research trip around South Vietnam.
Presented as a video installation, Cách Mình Đi Bộ) is a work that questions our perception of the political status quo as well as our gaze, summoning upon multiple realities as acts of dissent and transparency. The narratives alternate between interviews, the transporting of the machine, and people walking: their feet, their pace, the way they walk. The piece initially follows the path of scientific research, but nevertheless it could not escape inherent questions of culture, ethnomethodology, and anecdotal reliance. The video work plays on two screens, creating a disturbing, non-synchronous double vision that forces us to confront our own toleration of epistemic and cultural violence, and that also draws attention to the distinct proxy-work of Cilins and his own relationships with the participants.
This show is part of The House Trap, an exhibition program at la rada focused on emerging Swiss artists, curated by Riccardo Lisi and supported by Pro Helvetia.
Supported by: FCAC République et Canton de Genève, Stanley Johnson Stiftung, Literarisches Colloquium Berlin and Robert Bosch Stiftung.
Exhibition view of The Way We Walk, 2020.