rising from the swamps - in collaboration with Huy Hoàng
What is a swamp? Where does it sit in the history of District 7, an area that has undergone a near-total transformation of its ecological landscape over the past 20 years? Epitomized by the phrase “Rising from the swamps” (Harms 2013), the only remnants of the swamp are secondary elements in the discourse surrounding the prosperous development of the Phú Mỹ Hưng area. In terms of landscape, swamps have become isolated parts of less populated areas or have been commodified into a new aesthetic of displaying nature for culture, making up conditions of modernity (Latour 1993). Arising from the absence of swamps in the local developmental narrative of urbanization, Hoàng and Kiệt delve into the discourses of urbanization to reanimate the swamp. Dissolving photographic representation and archival materials like urban planning maps and collected images in a water tank, they desacralize the swamp’s disappearance in urban discourses. Until the elemental distortion of water re-shapes gridded thinking of urbanized processes and transforms its symbolic violence and the conflicts embedded in these narratives. Contesting the water flow as a conceptual void bridging nature and culture (Latour 1993), this project seeks to reanimate it as a subversive force of cartography, coalescing viewers’ bodies into new territories of imagination, urban landscape, and substance.