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)

Introducing the Ho Chi Minh Trail Project

Dear Giang

It was great to meet with you in Hanoi - really appreciate your thoughts and input and look forward to hopefully working with you. I would really like to read some of your writing - do you have anything in english you can forward? Be great to get a better idea of how you may be able to get involved. i meant to also ask you if you foresee any possibility in the future to resurrect T ? (not sure that i am allowed to email the name to you - but you know what i am talking about - i think Luong has put the 'god of fear' into me when trying to refer to this online project since i found out what happened to you).

See here for our 'Announcement of intention' for the 'Ho Chi Minh Trail' project. Be great to have your thoughts.
http://www.longmarchspace.com/yanan/huzhiming/e-index.html

In short, this project has a number of smaller programs within.

1. 'Borderless Futures': a hopeful sustainable exchange program between universities in China, Vietnam and Cambodia. It aims to share artist/lecturers from these countries in the hope of expanding the limited access to history, ideas and contemporary art developments in this region (particularly Vietnam and Cambodia). In the initial stage we will focus on progamming in Saigon and Beijing... with funding permitting we would like to take it further to Phnom Penh and even abroad to perhaps London where interest has been expressed to collaborate). We are hoping to work with universities, in the hope that the systems may change from within, but if this is not possible we will work with local art spaces to hold night-time informal discussions.

2. Artist collaborations: at the moment we are proposing artist collaborations between Vietnamese and Chinese artists (Dinh Y Nhi and Yu Hong for example), however we are also hoping to have involvement with international artists and there have been a couple of interesting proposals sent in since we launched the project online 2 weeks ago which is great.

3. Residency program: we aim to offer x3, one month residencies to aspiring young curators/writers from Vietnam/Cambodia/Laos to work with us here at Long March Space on various aspects of our ongoing program, and also help
with the management of the 'Ho Chi Minh Trail'.

4. OPEN CALL: I am working on a much better title for this, but essentially we want to invite artists to participate in making new work/ or proposing an existing work that engages with key themes of the overall Ho Chi Minh Trail. This will be an open call launched online (in the hope that international artists may propose), but then for the artists in the region we will be asking our project advisors to solicit, invite etc. We have several key ideas for the overarching subject for this potential exhibition which we hope to have finalized asap - ultimately this will be a process of getting new networks started and known and quite obviously, in typical Long March fashion, inciting complex ideas, issues and divides that are perhaps not confronted, discussed or accepted.

5. Moving the Avant Garde - a 2 week gathering of artists, curators, writers and like-minded creative thinkers. The historical associations of knowledge, people and power moving from North to South have a long and complicated history in this region (eg. Vietnamese national narrative 'Nam Tien – March to the South'). For this journey, artists and creative thinkers will travel
from South to North, leaving from Konpong Som, the Cambodian port city on the Gulf of Thailand. This will be a journey in backward memory of the Ho Chi Minh Trail and will focus as an opportunity for all participants in this program to get together, living the memory of the past through felt experience and discussion.

There will also hopefully be a publication at the end of all of this, documenting the entire process..... It's ambitious - but that's Long March! For further information on who we are and what we do please visit our website: www.longmarchspace.com (forgive us for the rather overload of information here - we are currently reconstructing the website :-)

Thanks Giang. Any questions, suggestions i would be happy to hear! {and i apologize for such a very long email - but there is just so much more to say!)
All the best
Zoe

(the above excerpt was shared on email on 9 July, 2008)