[general_devel] The Long March Project - Ho Chi Minh Trail (Duong Truong Son)

[Vern Weitzel]

http://hanoigrapevine.com/2009/07/lang_enlong-march-projectlang_enlang_vilong-march-projectlang_vi/

Long March Project
Posted: 22 Jul 2009. Filed under: Info for Artists.


The Long March Project - Ho Chi Minh Trail (Duong Truong Son)
offers a unique platform to begin artistic and educational discussion and 
imaginative collaboration between Long March Project and participants.

This undertaking could be considered a nomadic ‘residency’ where artistic 
practice and historical fact is challenged and ‘taken on the road’. Such 
dialogue could occur at the site of ‘Long March Education’ in Beijing; it could 
occur in the home of a Cambodian artist; on a train traveling south from Nanning 
to Hanoi; or over a blog site.


from the website:
http://www.hochiminhtrailproject.com/html/HCMT-E.html

The Long March Project - Ho Chi Minh Trail (Duong Truong Son) extends a 
contemporary campaign of critical discourse surrounding art and culture for the 
Long March Project, investigating the common threads and divergent perspectives 
of lived and historicized experience between creative thinkers from China, 
Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and the international diaspora.

Taking the creation and legacy of the ‘Ho Chi Minh Trail’ as a departure point 
for discussion, it aims to be a progressive educational exercise built on the 
value of process and exchange, rather than an assumed investment in result and 
object making (though undoubtedly a valid part of an artistic process).

The full context of the creation of the ‘Ho Chi Minh Trail’ or ‘Duong Truong 
Son’ in Vietnamese, offers a unique platform to begin artistic and educational 
discussion and imaginative collaboration between Long March Project and 
participants. To take Vietnam as an example, successive Chinese dynasties had 
political, economical and cultural connections with Vietnam in its early 
history. This country’s independence was under continual challenge, subsequently 
taken by the French in the late 19th Century, forming part of Indochina along 
with much of the Mekong Delta region, to be later problematized by the Japanese 
and the US (indirectly by China and Russia). Today, China and Vietnam is 
entering a new phase of understanding and cooperation, spurred by common 
historical and geographical metaphors of political colonialism; the historical 
and social consequence of immigration on economic and cultural platforms at home 
and abroad and many more complex realities that offer a multilayered set of 
meanings for defining contemporary ideas of society. Where is the everyday 
experience anchored in Vietnam today? What drives the direction of its progress?