Adaptation Fever (2006-2007)
multi-channel video installation
black & white with sound
digital video
Total running time: 20 minutes

PART 1: The Past is a Distant Colony (9:00)
PART 2: A Story in the Process of Self-Alienation (5:00)
PART 3: It’s True Because It’s Absurd (3:00)
PART 4: Explosions in the Sky (3:00)

Watch Explosions in the Sky here.
Watch The Past is a Distant Colony here.

These four discrete video works approach the archive through appropriation and disruption. Using found footage of Viet Nam during its French Indochina period, this project explores questions about the politics of representation and the construction of difference in relation to history, time, and memory. The split screen and juxtaposition become a simple technique whereby the “real” and by extension, its historical referent, are permanently deferred objects, further diminished through the overdubbed narratives in Vietnamese and French which are only briefly summarized in English subtitles. Playing with the idea that nostalgia can be evoked without memory or experience, and also by the co-dependent relationship between the West’s present and the Other’s desire for that present, this video appropriates archival images as a way to consider translation, postcolonial subjectivity, and sentimentality.