Treatment for a Year of the Rabbit
Photographs, video installation
2017
This film has already been made. It was made better than I could have ever made it. I’m glad it was made because to make a film about you is to risk death. When I went home for the first time I met your sisters, your brother, all their children, and all of their children’s children. They were alive even though I had hardly thought about their lives. I saw your name and my name and everyone else’s name on a delicate scroll that stretched across four bamboo mats and it felt like the earth was turning and moving and transforming but I was still, in a place I did not know existed. Since then, memories that I had never experienced have occupied my mind.
If it was possible to account for all the movement on the earth, disruptions by firepower, displacement by bloodshed, I would not be able to sleep at night. Instead every image becomes a film, every person becomes you.
I had heard that she was at her neighbor’s house that night, which I didn’t remember until now. But when we tried to reach them, we were too late. She had already burned her papers. And now we were in this position of having to make a decision without a lot of information. We wanted to leave with her and everyone else, but no one else could go.
Nhung mà mình làm cái gì duoc?
It was the Year of the Rabbit and we were not supposed to leave on the 1st, 7th or 8th of the month, so we were relieved it was not one of those days. So we left. The only way I ever thought about time was tuong lai là hien tai. The future is now.
