Moving the Avant Garde

Dear Zoe, thanks for your long email. Indeed the program looks very ambitious. Just a few comments from my side:

While things like exchange program, residency etc. are certainly useful, they have been done by other organizations too, with various degrees of success and impacts. What will make Long March stand out and truly different would be the component 5, the march along the HCM Trail. If prepared well, the march can be significant and unique to catch the attention of the art scene and intellectuals, and then become a serious cultural event not only in Vietnam, but in the region. Like what Long March did in China, I think the HCM Trail march would give a structure, a platform for many things: networking, regional and international, multi-disciplinary collaboration, stimulating intellectuals and the public to re-examine myth and history, utopia, identity, the road contemporary Vietnam is taking... The Vietnam War has shaped the world's history and still fascinates so
many people, so I'm sure the project would get a lot of outside interest. For Vietnam and the region it is also about time to return to that historical chapter which will help to reflect about our presence.

In short, I would like to see the Trail march as the heart, the core, the identity making part of the Long March endeavor in Vietnam. And I think it is important to actually travel along the Trail, (whether forward or backward is to be debated), not just take it as a metaphor. All the other activities (exchanges, residency...) can be carried out from there, after a foundation, a structure has been formed.

I understands that the Long March in China took several years of preparation, and I think the HCM Trail would need a very careful preparation too. If building up art infrastructure and having an impact in the intellectual life in Vietnam is part of the Long March agenda, and I believe it is, then I think the preparation process is as important as the trip itself with its outcome in terms of art work and texts, etc. We would be able to learn from the problems and obstacles which Long March in China encountered, many challenges would be of similar natures and at some point we need to be clear about what we want to achieve, when failure can be termed as success, and when failure is actually failure.

There are many other things to be considered and discussed: the political environment we have to work within, the specific Vietnamese context and the differences to China, etc. Looking forwards to exchanging more emails, but I think regular discussion sessions would be very useful - maybe you can spend time in Vietnam on a more regular basis to push things forwards.

Cheers,
Giang

(the below excerpt was shared on email on 18 July, 2008)