Read entire interview on the website of the Living Refugee Archive here:

https://www.livingrefugeearchive.org/a-conversation-with-moi-tran

A Conversation with MOI TRAN, on the Civic Voice Archive, Radical Archiving and Everything In-between

By Akinpelu Funmilayo.
PhD Researcher at the University of Alabama.

Being a person who likes to talk (sometimes for no good reason), I recognize that there is never truly an end to a conversation. Whether spoken/initiated today or years ago, words always find ways to thrive and become something more. They creep into the ears and inhabit the bodies of hearers, ingratiating themselves into unsuspecting minds saddled with the burden of being guardians of other people’s opinions and feelings. They bloom into action too, when we least expect. Thus, every conversation, regardless of when, where, or how it was said, foregrounds itself as the portkey to exploring several corridors of another’s thoughtscape. More than five months ago (maybe six or seven months even), I had a conversation with Moi Tran, a collaborator with the Living Refugee Archive, an organization spearheading the Civic Voice Archive (CVA) project and many more other archival interventional projects. Although it would seem like the conversation was left to wilt in the face of time, distance, and the angsty sloth that comes from mentally turning over to a blank, new page in my storied life, I recently went over the discussion I had with the duo, listened to it afresh, while making a textual transcript out of the nearly one-hour worth of discussion. During the process of transcription, I was struck by how much of the conversation had inadvertently guided my artistic endeavours over the course of the last months.

Subconsciously, I had immensely taken in the opinions, viewpoints, and autobiographical expositions on experimental aestheticism that Moi Tran constantly doled out during the period of the conversation and those assimilated ideas impacted my decision to embark on an interactive storytelling exhibition which I am currently in the midst of executing. For this reason, the conversation that I had with Moi Tran has taken a new, experiential shape for me, and I cannot help but wonder how my current outlook and framing of the conversation have evolved from what it was when the conversation was initiated sometime in July. In the next few pages, I will be offering an overview of some of the very vital points that has stuck with me over the months since my conversation with Moi Tran, with the hope that they work magic in your mind as a reader, and flourish into a comprehensible depth that catalyzes a perceptive appreciation for the currently trendy radicalization of archiving through artistic interventions.

But first, the question, who is Moi Tran and why does my conversation with her mean so much to me, why should it mean so much to anyone, especially archivists, artists, creatives? Moi Tran is a Vietnamese artist with Chinese heritage who works and lives in London. Her artistic interest in exploring the “intersection between contemporary art and live performance” has led her to earning several portfolios that crisscross the interdisciplinary sections of theatre, opera, dance etc. Not only is she a visual artist, performance maker, and designer, she is also a scenographer and costume designer. There is a thorough academic streak to Tran’s work and activities as they mostly challenge social, racial, gender, and national anomalies/discriminations while engaging with theoretical thinkers and writers. I cannot claim to have done any justice to my description of Tran as an artist and researcher, but you can find more information on her website – moitran.com. Away from the rather bio-oriented portrayal of Tran, it cannot but be said that there is something visceral about her artistic productions; they are often enlivened by the emotive and far-reaching modes of presentation through which they are conveyed. Having acquired so many hands-on divergent skills, and sharing a passion for several art forms, Tran believes in the need to avoid labels that strictly categorize her works as one thing or the other. Thus, she is not afraid to express her unique brand of art through different mediums which she manages to converge in a radical and, dare I say, experimental way.

Giving one’s self the freedom to access several conduits of expressivity is not something that truly comes easy to most artists. But Tran, in her conversation with me, narrowed in on how she came to the knowledge of her artistic power by first embracing her desire to embody her passion in her works through artistic radicalism. It is by opening up to the fluidity of this knowledge, as well as the free-flowy nature of her artistic journey that she has been able to produce art works that can best be defined as eclectic and emotionally charged:

Her words reveal this much:

In terms of my practice, I have had a detour. I have worked in multiple, different disciplines so, along the way, I picked up lots of skills that are perhaps not typical, conventional for a fine artist. And I guess also within that journey, I have realised that in order to construct myself a space that felt radical, that felt experimental, I needed to approach art with the same mindset. So, instead of perhaps labeling myself as one thing, I found that by avoiding that labeling, I was giving myself the freedom to be more adaptable to many mediums. And that might not have come from the intention to be experimental; ehm, for me, it was really about identifying mediums that would help me construct the worlds and experiences that I was hoping to make in my performance work and that might be many different facets that I would have to employ. I think also because I work in opera, theatre, and dance, I am very aware of the elements that make up a performance or an experience or an event so I have always been very interested in how the multitude of sensorial experiences in a performance really can galvanise and fracture off at the same time. So, that in itself is really exciting for me, the ability for whatever it is I put into a space to sort of form, be one thing.

What Moi Tran calls a detour into fractional, non-linear forms of storytelling through art led me to a strong awareness that art finds better expressivity in chaos, in multitudes, in collaged roughness of narrations that do not follow formulaic methods or mediums but are born out of the desire to put together multiplicities of thoughts in ways that resonate with many other people whose thoughts are also incoherent yet cohesive in ways that defy logic. Although it is a simplistic way of putting, I like to term this way of conceiving art as experimental storytelling and those in the field of digital humanities would think of it as fitting the genre of digital storytelling. Talking more about how she came into a self-awareness about experimental, digital storytelling, Tran said these words to me:

What makes that interesting also, I guess in terms of the digital and experimental storytelling that you speak of, is that I am more interested in [what is called] non-linear storytelling; that in itself means that I, in some way, capture the way that my brain processes information when I write. So, I might jump from (if we were talking about a timeline), let’s say in a spectrum of 20 days – an arbitrary number – I would start out with day four in my piece of writing and I would jump to day sixteen, for example so I will jump back and forth. And to me, that method allows me to discover the gaps or the in-between spaces of storytelling and that really is what I am interested in; there is no drive for me to tell linear stories in my own performances. I mean, I tell linear stories in my theatre collaborations but, for me, I always am interested in telling stories that perhaps are wedged or live in between the lines, in the same way I celebrate marginalised spaces, as spaces of radical knowledge making. So, in itself, it sort of ties together and informs a research and the work I make, and this sort of approach is also something that I am applying to the way I work with “archives”. Again, for me, it’s definitely, for me, the anti-archive; it’s what happens in-between [as opposed to] what is conventionally archived. It’s not following a linear process of what we might think of archiving; instead, it’s finding those in-between spaces that preservation, records, and documents might actually be able to excavate [out] of the stories, the experiences, the memories, the sounds [of people].

One of Tran’s art productions that I find myself enthralled by is The Bolero Effect. Right after I started my conversation with her, I immediately started to express my admiration for the eclectic blend of opera, theatre/live performance, narrativization, and visual artsiness that The Bolero Effect enmeshes together to make a political protest piece that… yet… The Bolero Effect and the artistic process that went into its execution offers a good example of how Moi Tran pours into a cocktail mix all the various ingredients that shows a rare artistic and cultural depth of expressivity, one that in most cases is stripped off because of the mediational fog that shrouds art. Moi Tran gave a lot of generous insight into the process of making The Bolero Effect and how this process was mostly defined by her constant endeavour to represent and embody the lived experiences of people whom she identifies with, both racially, historically, and culturally:

With The Bolero Effect, it was a process (although a bizarre one) of two years of research on music and looking at theories of emotion in East Asian, South East Asian diaspora communities and I created a piece of work in London where I also wrote a paper as part of that research, looking at the radical act of reconfiguring emotional knowledge, particularly within East Asian South East Asian diaspora communities, as not a pathological state of being, as in that trauma becomes identity, but actually to celebrate that this type of knowledge, this embodied, emotional folk knowledge – is something that we, as diaspora people, displaced people, marginalised communities, can actually learn to celebrate and resist erasure and resist having to feel assimilated into the mainstream, conventional thinking.

Music, for Tran, is especially a connective thread she shares with the East Asian South East Asian communities, both diasporic and indigenous, and nurturing her musical heritage by tapping into its root is something that has inspired Tran to strive to tether her message to arts of all forms – be it music, theatre, photography. Tran expressly made this point clear in her dialogue with me:

[With The Bolero Effect], I was trying to unpack with my heritage through music and sounds and how that embeds itself into my knowing, my embodied knowledge. How is it that I can know something simply by knowing a song? And that song [is one that] I had learnt or heard through my parents so it then becomes this sort of portal-ed, transmitted knowledge, they are transmitting that knowledge to me. But they are not transmitting a knowledge [through] linear teaching; they are transmitting a knowledge [through] emotional, embodied teaching, something that you cannot learn from a book, something that you definitely cannot learn from Westernised pedagogical systems. But that sort of knowledge had always been something that had been underrepresented, undervalued in the country that I grew up in (right?), like folklore, ancestral knowledge, kinship, emotional knowledge, and how there are different ways of learning that. So, The Bolero Effect was an opportunity to challenge and unpack [and] disseminate some of that thinking. It looked at a particular genre of music called Gold music. That was a band in Vietnam. But when the Vietnamese refugees left Vietnam at that point in time, they took the music with them and it continued to be part of the soundtrack(s) of their lives as they settled or unsettled or disrupted, you know? So, what traveled with them was not necessarily just the song and the composition, it was a feeling that perhaps couldn’t quite be explained through anything, any word, or any theory that I could (as a scholar and artist) attach to as a way of anchoring some of that reflection.

Gold/Yellow Music, I recently came to discover, is a musical trend that has come to stand for a form of resistance for the Vietnamese people, especially those of the late 20^th century who saw the end of the Vietnam war and had to directly reckon with the Communist ill-bliss that followed in its wake. Back then, to sing or patronise Yellow Music was fatal, and frowned upon, much so that a lot of people had to move from Vietnam to the US or other places to save their necks and also save their music. Unsurprisingly, Yellow music is associated with the bolero genre (a form of romantic folk poetry sang by Eastern Cuban trovadores). The political essence of Tran’s production of this piece shines through the knowledge that it draws from an agelong tradition of communal resilience against political sabotage. But even more, the diasporic streak of Gold Music and its retainment in the lives and actions of Vietnamese people living across international borders show that music is mobile, it can be kept alive strongly by the desires of people who have come to own it for themselves. Realizing the power of people to keep memories and music alive, Tran has long since started investing herself in the project of preserving musical heritage and folk sounds within the crevice of the London archival scene. One would wonder about the viability of storing anything other than old historical documents and textual records in old, often-forgotten archival spaces but Tran has proven that it is both possible to use the archive as a place for preserving musical memories and to make the preserved oral records accessible to anyone both physically and on the digital space. This is a process she, alongside the scholars that she intellectually alludes to, calls radical archiving. It is in lieu of her investment in radical archiving that Moi Tran collaborates with the Living Refugee Archive to start the project called Civic Voice Archive. In describing the collaborative project, Moi Tran had these words to say:

So, we started working on this project and it has always been about challenging the archive, challenging the agency, and working in an unruly way, outside and within it. You know, that energy has always been there. For example, this project, the Civic Voice Archive, is about civic voice, civic sounds, and the collection and preservation of folk, ancestral knowledge, wisdom from marginalised spaces, myth, and legend, and all of those things… because they circle around the mythical, they don’t seem to hold the weight of knowledge (and, I guess, this rests in pedagogical concepts), and that, for me, does not make any sense. So, this archive is really to be called anything, any piece of knowledge that comes through as an oral experience, this is the home for it. It doesn’t need to be perfect, it doesn’t need to be academic, it can just be felt, you know, emotional knowledge. I started it also as a space of resistance, to resist erasure, to resist extinction (extinction is the word because it is not only species that can go extinct, it’s knowledge can go extinct). So Civic Voice Archive is really about inviting that; so, if you have two lines of a folk song that you heard somewhere, you should record it… it could be on your phone, it could be gritty, we celebrate all of that. The Civic Voice Archive is a space to preserve all of that knowledge. I have received quite a few different contributions online, from like Vietnam, from Philippines, and Malaysia, and I have been recording in the UK as well. So, I started it with a focus on East Asian, South East Asian communities, but it sort of has expanded now, and I have also incorporated it into other projects I am working on.

True, any mention of archivism often recourses to western pedagogy and its institutional systems which, often than not, makes provision for eurocentric, written forms of (hi)stories that it can identify with. From academic observation, it becomes clear that the (hi)stories of marginalized spaces are only subjected to archival storage, preservation, access granting etc. if it serves the gaze of eurocentrized entities.[1] This foregrounds the necessity of grounding archiving in non-eurocentric spaces as well and pulling the thread of archival practices to places of one’s racial, national, communal belonging. This is what radical archiving is basically about. Living Refugee Archive is one radical archiving institution that recognizes this, hence, their affirmative extension of archival value to indigenous spaces. For one, the Civic Voice Archive is focused on pulling the voices of people from so-called peripheries and bringing it to the centre, foregrounding those voices and their oral essence into a space where they are made to truly matter.

It is not surprising then that the submissions that have continuously been tendered as prospective fonds to be included in the Civic Voice Archive go beyond being narrative collections stored in the cold, seamless walls of the virtual space, they are actively included in the scheme of activities that matter for the keeping of musical posterity. They are put out there – on exhibition fields, operatic arenas, artistic covens, in diasporic nooks and crannies – where they find an audience who bask in their durable aural quintessence and pass the ethos of the genealogical musical magic from their minds to their memories, and then, to others. Moi Tran emphatically talked about the kinetic aspirations that she and team members of the Living Refugee Archive (one of whom is Paul Dudman) has for CVA oral submissions:

So, the Civic Voice Archive not just a project, an archive that exists on its own; it’s an archive that is simultaneously documenting the conversations and relationships I am building through my other works. So, as an example, I am making a performance piece for Spill Festival (which already took place in Ipswich), that is called Shy God: A Community Chorus and it’s inviting these twenty-five community singers to come together to create this cacophony of noise through sounds, and there is fifteen different languages, twenty-five different tones, musicalities; it’s just going to like be a crazy riot, which is brilliant. But I have also asked each person to donate a song or a poem so the performers have also become [part of the] Civic Voice Archive; the people who wanted to contribute a song to the Civic Voice Archive but couldn’t perform, they also have a place to be. And within the chorus so far, we have Vietnamese[s], [people from] lots of different areas of Africa – Uganda, Libya, Mozambique; lots of different songs that are coming from… first tongue languages, dialects.

[1] I deliberately did not capitalize the word “eurocentric”. That can be changed if you want.

Imagine that! Like a dialect from Namibia up against Vietnamese, the two tones together, the two musicalities, it sounds like… well, as you can see, I am excited about this… So, it’s sort of an ongoing thing. It is using the archive to make conversations, to make friends, and to learn about people. For me, I am the facilitator, I am the person holding the camera, you know, everybody who has contributed, they are the people making the work. That feels really good as well; it feels like truly collaborative as an archive, not just one person deciding what’s put in. Uhm, the only thing I would say about an archive is that I wouldn’t post any hate crime or a hate speech on the archive, but if it’s anything else… I am open to that…

Yes, the indigeneity of Tran’s works comes through strongly in how she approaches the Civic Voice Archive but it also is manifest in the treatment of her personal works. Take The Bolero Effect as an example. Despite the diasporic strain that characterizes the Yellow Music-bolero genre from which it draws its references, Moi Tran thought it best to entrench the work in the very beginning whence it first arose. Rather than simply create a bolero effect that attunes with the East Asian South East Asian diasporic community in Europe, Tran decided to fuse the trend’s diasporic terrain with which she is familiar, with its spatial indigenous root which she has only come to familiarise herself with in recent times:

So, I went back to Vietnam to make this piece of work; to use that particular form of music which is the tenuous line that links the [Vietnam] homeland, people, family, to the diaspora who travelled through Hong Kong and many various places that they faced persecution, and [then] settled in the UK, America, Canada, France, and many different (pockets) of the world. But there is this tenuous link and this tenuous link wasn’t necessarily lucid or clear but it was definitely something that bound people together in an emotional reckoning and understanding of each other. The Bolero Effect is an attempt at creating a public assembly of Vietnamese Diaspora – myself and some other artists and then a local community ensemble to make a performance that gave us space to explore some of these theorisations of Vietnamese displacement and identity politics.

From what Moi Tran said about her importunity to collaborate with artists residing in Vietnam in order to bridge a gap between the “the tenuous line that links the Vietnam homeland” and diasporic communities, I sensed the importance of collaboration to any work of art hoping to tell a holistic story that borders on refugeeism and the many influences that act upon it in their various shades. The Bolero Effect does not only tap into a long musical legacy whose sociopolitical impact swings from one end to the other of the historical pendulum, it also documents the oral trajectory of a people who, due to political circumstances in their place of national belonging, had to migrate homeward to new abodes. The roaming roundedness that comes from the immersion of The Bolero Effect in thorough collaborative artistry inadvertently intensified the experimental, non-linear, transmediatic vibe of the work, such that, by intentionally collaborating with other artists who share her vision, the production of The Bolero Effect was extensively and expansively inducted into other artistic platforms that then caused the narrative to be non-linear. Tran explained this to me clearly in her own words:

[The Bolero Effect] sort of wrote itself into [being a] performance, film, original composition, choreography, a text, which is sort of a loose script [and done as a] public performance. It started as a performance, it ended as a series of twelve film chapters and one of the shortest chapters is only three minutes long; and, from there, it goes on to become a live performance again and then it reverses into a hybrid of live and digital. There was some other background research that very much informed that piece of work. In terms of medium, I went to Vietnam and realised that I wanted to work with community and community performers that I felt very strongly about, and I also felt very strongly about my collaboration with an activist singer in Vietnam. He had been imprisoned in Vietnam for ten years [just] for singing, and I found about his life story and was lucky enough to meet him, and speak with him and collaborate with him in some works. Those were the sort of things I knew that I felt strongly about.

Having talked about how artistic consciousness, community, and collaboration contribute to the process of creating works of radical archiving and experimental storytelling, it is important to also mention that artistic works like The Bolero Effect often get fully embodied in radical aesthetics due to how they spiral out of a series of mediatic coincidences and conscientious artivism. Taking the plunge to create non-conventional narratives that touch on heavy topics like migration, identity politics, and political resistance is tantamount to being ready to weather unpleasant misadventures both from within or without and even being ready to channel the bad energy from these misadventures into synergized artistic action. Knowing this, Tran acknowledged how some of the aesthetical qualities now attributed to The Bolero Effect were born out of incidences and coincidences that she had to face head-on with artivistic fervour:

The other aspects of the medium, they were sort of an almost call-and-response process… one, we were only performing the performance twice; two, we actually did not get official permission from the government, you have to jump through hoops to perform … and they wouldn’t issue me a license to perform because they said that, uhm, [pause] I was a foreign element and so they wouldn’t let me perform. We had to pay money, we had to do all sorts of stuff; in the end, we could not get it. So, we decided to go ahead with it and then just hope for the best, because, actually, a couple of public events that week had been invaded by the police and many people had been arrested. It was a big risk but, luckily, we were able to perform. So, in a way, I wanted to preserve that experience in a digital film so that’s how it came about. And I guess that the aesthetics and, in the end, the edit of it [the film] was very much in response to the performance that was being made at the same time. I had already started writing the script but I gave it a looseness that I could also respond to conversations that were happening in Vietnam and incorporate that into the writing, and the music, we composed in Vietnam, so again, that was a response to the whole process. In many ways, it is very much a device piece. And yeah, I think, it was an organically developed piece that developed into different mediums and forms, but I always have a leaning for working in multidisciplinary ways so, of course, some of those things could have been informed by some of my initial interest.

The birthing of experimentality, of radicality, of non-linearity out of collaboration and coincidences says much about how flexibility in artistic production need to be allowed for. Being flexible with form, with mediums, and partner whom one collaborates with, allows for mediatic ‘coincidences’ to take root in our works and spring forth as pure aesthetics. Because art finds coherence through chaos, it is no surprising that The Bolero Effect is able to realize both functional and aesthetic purpose through its yielding to the congruence that thrives in the midst of mediatic differences. Just as Moi said, “in the instance of The Bolero Effect, the moment the ensemble sings together and then break apart; so even within the architecture of the house, they are in different rooms and different things are happening so, narratives are unfolding and encounters and contact zones are being created.”

Coming back full circle to the central issue of experimental, non-linear storytelling that had led Moi Tran and me to go into a discussion about The Bolero Effect and CVA’s radical archiving approach, I wanted Tran to tether me to reasons why using mediums of alterity to tell her narratives are important, especially in a world flooded with works of all kinds floating aimlessly like fossils in a flux, and the response that Tran gave me is one I think is instructive for artists who need reasons to push boundaries in the creation of narratives or meta-narratives.

If we were to look at non-linear storytelling, for me, each piece of work is never the last piece of work for me… It has a transient quality which keeps changing. For example, For me, that’s always the most important thing of non-linear storytelling/work. For me, it’s like a space, I feel, I guess like Fred Moten calls it – a fugitive space – that feels like really interesting and important to me. It feels like a space that doesn’t lock you down; it doesn’t say that’s what you’ve got to be, that’s how you’ve got to work because you are a refugee, that’s how you are supposed to act, right? And so, I think, in terms of how that, type of approach affects my work and the ways I like to find spaces, celebrate the marginal, because it’s just more interesting to think about the unruly ways that we can work, rather than having to follow some substructures, [structures] that have partly been imposed, I guess, by colonization and empire… so, in my way, that in itself [non-linear storytelling] is an act of resistance. I guess that also informs the interest I have in disturbing the archive or archival technique, and saying that I want to work within the archival system, which is, the conventional archival system, but I don’t want to be pinned down.

To this end, Moi Tran credits Paul Dudman, an archivist she is collaborating with on the CVA project, with these words: “[This] is what’s brilliant, actually, with working with Paul… he has been giving me the freedom to change the project and to adapt the project and I realise how important that has been, in the shaping of this [CVA] work.” The Civil Voice Archive is such important work indeed, and it is one that has progressed tremendously since this interview was conducted. Moi Tran and Paul Dudman set a nice trend through the collection of these oral stories and histories with dedicatory passion and it is safe to say that their work will pay off in the long run.

Beyond CVA, there is something to say about the oral and kinetic quality of most of Tran’s works, one that has heightened her relevance amidst the crop of artists in the European diasporic communities where they are mostly consumed. The kinesis in Tran’s works mostly thrives on the ability to take new shapes and meaning based on the perspective from which they are being gazed upon and interpreted. This can be figurative as is the case with such photography exhibits as Three Women and a Duck and The Circuit, and, in other cases, it can be as literal as it can get, as it is with Tran’s repertoire of moving poetry. Yes, it is just as it sounds – moving poetry, poetry that moves. It is not the words on the pages of the digital sheet that moves, it is the landscape within which the poems in question are situated. There is something more I noticed – the idea of moving poetry is something that I find interesting. Tran, though her moving poetry, embodies deeply resonant poetic words in a corporeal, hand-full way that gives them a richer context and character. The imbuement of words with corporeality is done through images as in Shadow Painting, or stylistic devices that give the illusion of movement like Memory Plan for the Future – To Cath as well as other similar installations. There is no black or white in how Tran’s words move through space and across time to create a robust visual, textual, and kinetic experience for viewers and readers alike.

In my opinion, the very idea of moving poetry finds a place in the broad and vast practice of archiving in unconventional ways itself. So, I could not but ask Tran about her process of making poetry into moving pieces that you can installable (and detachable while still retaining meaning), such that photography and words become merged into something really organic. She did expand on what it meant to really take words in its abstract form and make it a part of everything solid and material, like wood, earth, metal, brick, bones, and bodies. Moi’s own words best embodies this transcendent idea I am trying to depict. About the concept of moving poetry, she said:

It is deeply connected to migration and sound, and sound meaning oral history and everything that it encompasses. For me, the idea of words moving or sounds moving in a physical form is a really rich area of study. I would say that when I started to think about archive, I was particularly drawn to the fact that my body is an archive, and that I embody an archive, not just in my physical being, I have made a lot of repetitive work, performance-wise and craft, and I can feel that my muscles have a memory of that experience (it hurts slightly here [and there] some days), and that is history and archive on my body. But then, I have transmitted knowledge, and emotional knowledge, and ancestral knowledge and wisdom, and also the richness of kinship that I carry with me. You know, my body is an archive. When I started to think about that and I started to think about that in a more ephemeral spectrum, then, I start to think, well right now, these words I have passed on to you is part of the archive, moving forward, moving on, or transmitting to you, sticking to you, and that move is interesting to think about in that way. Then I start to think about the idea of the materiality of words, I start to think about the performative aspect of speaking word, of making sound, and how to sort of interrogate that space, that transmission space, I guess. So, it happened that some of the installations came out of that thinking and research and writing. So, I am just really interested to see words in different ways, through something that is as solid and as permanent as Etched on Black Marble and as impermanent and temp and intransient as Speaking. So, that poetry has been performed, it has been performed before, but it has also been etched on black marble. So that for me is really interesting, the sort of different forms that preservation can take. When I say preservation, [it includes] documentation and archiving that can exist in a multitude of ways because as long as we witness it, it exists. That again for me is an ongoing project that hasn’t finished.

Muscle memory. Isn’t that all too true? The body remembers, and it forms movements based on what it remembers. Shouldn’t words be made to embody this all-too-familiar notion as well as other sign languages? Buttressing this line of thought, Tran went further to describe her own adapted forms of moving poetry and painting as kinetic sculptures and I couldn’t agree more. Being a writer who have, since consciousness, been buried in the entanglements of words, Tran’s words brought me to the realization that too much semantic preeminence has been accorded to words and this is damning its relationship with other semiotic signs. With my head full of these thoughts, I blurted out to Tran about how I feel like words are overrated. Then, I asked her, “what do you is the place of words in all your works?” Her answer was as intelligent as it was thought-provoking:

I couldn’t give you a set answer for that. Sometimes, I make works and I don’t write anything. I feel like a lot of artists a lot of times are sort of expected to write to explain their own works, and that doesn’t give space for people to experience the works themselves. Like The Bolero Effect and The Circuit, because there was this extensive research behind them, I wanted to write something… but there are pieces that I would prefer to write as – this hole I dug, it took me 6 hours and 45 minutes, and then, I filled it back in. I don’t want to say anything more about that because you experience it, it can be seen in so many different ways. So, you are right, I feel like I have put in my dues with learning how to use words and I feel like now, I should have the luxury of using them when I need to, and not using them when I need to. So, yeah, [with] language, sometimes words cannot express the things you want to say and, sometimes, it can be said in fewer words. So, I feel like it’s such a relationship that constantly needs to be revisited, you know? And sometimes, I feel like I just can’t write, I feel really intimidated about it some days and I think, I can’t write. I feel like, also, when I make the decision not to write, it’s okay now… I shouldn’t feel like just because I make works in this way, I should like I have to, all of the time, behave in a certain way. But society and work in this way really pressurizes you to use words like this, and yeah, it sort of puts an emphasis on being able to linguistically communicate, you know? There is a lot of ancient knowledge and ancestral knowledge that is based on non-speaking, and you communicate in other ways. And there is a space in this society for that; people don’t make space for it. I feel like we shouldn’t succumb to that pressure but some people love words and that is alright.

There is something courageous about making out of words only what you need to, and not merely what you are expected to. Rows and rows of words everywhere, do they carry as much value as we place on them? I think not. For one, it is interesting how traditional archival institutions are also intent on excluding non-linguistic forms of communication. This, yet again, emphasizes the importance of the Civic Voice Project, currently been executed by Moi Tran and Paul Dudman.

To be fair, during the conversation, it was not only Tran that was doing the talking. I also chatted away about personal interests and research engagements that relate, if only indirectly, with Tran’s own work. I particularly mentioned how I am particularly “interested in morphing together everything that has to do with contemporary developments in 21st-century literature, especially within the context of Nigeria”. What easily comes to mind as one of the contemporary literary trends is digital storytelling. And just as I told Tran, I do “think digital storytelling is one of the biggest contemporary developments and it has been associated mostly with Africanfuturism, within the context of Nigeria. [In fact], you hear of Africanfuturism, you hear of digital storytelling by the side”. However, beyond my interest in digital storytelling, I discussed with Tran my avid fascination for Asian art and entertainment. I could not help but talk about how it was going to influence the focus for my academic research and creative endeavour:

For the past year since COVID happened, I have been pretty much interested in Asian sort of, ehm, digital storytelling methods and the sort of difference they have in promoting themselves… I am a BTS fan and I am [enamored] by fourth-generation Kpop idols but it’s just how there is a universe, a cinematic and transmediatic universe around which they produce their works, their songs are not just songs, it is something more… There is a strand of digital storytelling to what they do … This is new to me but I think I want to compare it with the Nigerian situation or the African situation. How do they do it differently; it would seem like the African digital forms of storytelling are depoliticised while the Asian counterpart is depoliticised and more commercial.  I have not narrowed it down but hopefully it will be Chinese Wuxia/Xianxia novels as opposed to African futurist speculative fiction… Kpop as opposed to Afropop… The cinematic universe/transmediatic of the Korean movie industry as opposed to Nollywood…

Like most people that I have told, Moi Tran laughed when she heard that I am a proud fan of BTS. It’s only to be expected. It is difficult to not, at least, show the slightest surprise at hearing that an academic whose perception of the world is coloured by heavy streaks of theoretical frameworks/orientations loves Kpop. And this is not to talk of the fact that I am a Nigerian whose lived experiences revolve around different genres of music that are far removed from Asian musical specialty. After listening to me ramble on and on about my love for the Bangtan Boys and their entertaining transmediatic universe, Tran asked me how I plan to align my pop cultural interests with archiving. Like Moi Tran, I am also interested in the ways I can make archivism transcend its primary role as a platform for the documentation of the shards of mostly written histories. But still, the framing of Tran’s question bore a clarity that triggered a challenge in my mind, a challenge to truly find a locus that I could honestly take off from in terms of my research interests and practice.

She had asked me particularly – “In terms of your practice, are you interested in practices of radical archiving, and within that interest, are you sort of leaning into writing or multiple digital practices.” Revved up by her question and the way it subconsciously struck a zestful cord in my mind, I could not help but find a basis of comparing what I am interested in doing with the artistic works she is pushing out recently. “Recently, I have been interested in experimental writing,” I said, “Interactive storytelling in the sense that words, images, and sounds are used to tell a story… The major difference between what I intend to do and what you are already doing so far is the performative aspect to it. Mine is not performative, it is not embodied with theatre attributes, mine is the cross media combination of words, images, and sounds, nothing more.”

Nodding to my sure-yet-unsure answer to her question, Tran offered a silent validation to my ideas, and the road on which I have chosen to walk, both academically and creatively. Without mincing words, I did feel a connection to her at the moment, one that can be captured with the word – sorority. Being both women that can be counted as living on the margins, I was quick to notice that Tran’s show of support and offering of validation to artistic women goes beyond lending her ears to my words and nodding in affirmation as I talked about my academic and creative interests, it also extends to centering her works around Southeast Asian women, giving them parts in her films, and addressing issues that concern them. I asked her a question based on my observation: “I have noticed an embodiment of womanness in your works. I would not want to call it feminism because I do not know your take on it. But still, I would like to know, is that deliberate? Moi Tran’s response to me was refreshing and straightforward, because it meant I could explicitly call her a feminist:

Yeah, it’s definitely deliberate. The intention to collaborate with women or people who identity as women. I am particularly inspired by feminist writing, and some of the people, I would say, have influenced my thinking deeply are women writers, thinkers, radical artmakers, or thought makers, I guess, and for me, that’s definitely not a coincidence. Ehm, I relate to their spirits and I am particularly interested in Vietnamese matriarchal society before Chinese occupation. Women in spiritual roles and guiding knowledge, a woman’s knowledge, that is something I am really fascinated with. And the radical type of thinking that can exist and be born out of spaces inhabited by women is also very exciting for me. So, it’s definitely deliberate; that is how I work and the people I like to collaborate with.

From my conversation with Tran, I picked up on the fact that archival institutions are well endowed to do much more than the designated task of being a collection spot for semi-processed and unprocessed data and information stacked into fonds that are accessible to the public. Even more, though, I learnt from dialoguing with Tran about her life’s work and the Civic Voice Project that the stories that need telling do not immediately crop up in our full view; they are not the very obvious ones. The stories that need to be told come from the margins of people’s lives and experiences, and they often find their ways into the crevices of modes and practices that do not exactly come across as conventional. Radical archiving, experimental and/or digital storytelling, moving poetry are all unconventional practices of telling daily, lived experiences or the oral histories of entire ancestries and generations whose struggles have been largely removed from center stages and relegated to the background of other capitalistically-sponsored stories that have become regular headliners over the years.

It’s surprising to know that, especially in this day and age, it is often taken for granted that there are people like Moi Tran who are actively in the business of breaking stylistic barriers to tell stories that truly need telling. When I did get around to asking Moi Tran about how the reception to her unconventional ways of telling unconventional stories has been, her response knocked me off the park. In fact, it still remains an abiding principle for me till date, as it should be for any creative or archivist who engage in radical storytelling practices. She said to me, it is much more fulfilling “if five people read your work and it changes their lives, [than having] five hundred people who will only read the first page and just say, “yeah, cool.” This might sound like the stuff of cliché, but honestly, there is nothing more important than having one’s stories create positive impact in people’s lives, be it five people or five hundred.