IN-PERSON London. Section B
Abstract
Fiona Ngô’s “The New Ecology of Art” imagines the urban landscape as an archive that reveals the remainders of war, deforestation, and the effects of climate crisis. Even as globalized industry and development manufacture renewed city spaces, the unburied past of wars lingers at our feet. Ngô considers Cambodian sculptor Sopheap Pich’s fallen myrtle trees encased in scrap metal collected around Phnom Penh and Vietnamese filmmaker Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s film The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon (2022), which follows a scrap dealer/ sculptor who scavenges unexploded bombs to sell and to transform into temple bells and Calder-like mobiles, in the Vietnamese northern coastal town of Quang Tri. Ngô argues for new modes of being through a reclamation of disaster’s waste, an ecological ontology composed through the permeable boundaries of the human, objects, and nature.
Fiona Ngô is a musician, sound artist, and Associate Professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of Virginia. Ngô was the touring guitarist for Alice Bag from 2013-2017, has composed and performed soundscapes for plays and video installations, is the author of Imperial Blues: Geographies of Race and Sex in Jazz Age New York, and is currently at work on “Fragments,” a book that confronts fragmentation, disability, and deathliness in the art, poetry, and film work of the Southeast Asian diaspora.
4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Wednesday 26th June, 2024