RAW IDEAS

Dear friends,

We are very happy to inform to you about the successful accomplishment of the project, Raw Idea Project, which is the first one of our long-term project Intensive Art Residency

During one month of the project, invited artists, curator and facilitators from ZeroStation (www.zerostationvn.org) have worked very hard to make project successful. Not to mention to 15 video clips, two opening studios, and two public performances, which have been produced during one month of the project, and which tell only very little about the true but hidden profits that artists have acquired in the process of not only working, but living together everyday in one month, the successfulness of the project locates at the point that, it seems the first time in Vietnamese contemporary art field, art production activity now becomes a platform for pure experiments in terms of eliminating all market and fame-making pressures in order to interrogate inwardly about the nature of creativity, collaboration, and above all, contemporary art, not only in its “techne” aspect, but also in its (trans)cultural aspects, and especially its “contextulizational” aspects when it is imported/translated into a country as Vietnam

The Raw Idea Project, in this sense, tells very much about the spirit of the Intensive Art Residency Project, which has been built with the main purpose to find a kind of “social fracture” (in the usage’s way of Karl Marx) for Vietnamese local artists to escape from all pressures that naturally comes from the market. These pressures, regardless all of the beautiful (and of course, exotic) brands they name for Vietnamese contemporary art practices such as Vietnamese avant-garde art, Vietnamese post-reformation art, etc., only channel Vietnamese local artists into a pure practicalism. And this practicalism, born from the wedding between winners-losers logic of late capitalism (Frederic Jameson, The logic of late capitalism) and shameless sophism of that so called socialist-oriented market economy, will very soon kills all true creativities, and even more dangerously, all artistic and intellectual honesty of artists as cultural practicers

However, we are not innocent in terms of being ignorant about the power of the market when we are trying to set up a “fracture” for local artists to “escape” from it. With the word “escape” used here, we do not mean that local artists should against, or should go to the mountain to hide away from the market, a mission is clearly utopian (not to mention to the fact that the price of mountain land in Vietnam now go very high). What we mean by using the word “escape” here only a creation a tactical platform, or more exactly, a tactical move for local artists to, hopefully, survive in their encounter with the market, especially when they, different with their colleagues from Western world, or even from Asia in general, have not been prepared well, or even, have not been prepared at all, for this encounter

In this sense, Intensive Art Residency Project is a very tactical (“tactical” here used in the interpretation way of Michel de Certeau in his book “the practice of everyday life) vehicle for local artists to use it to move smartly in the art world that has been built from the complex power relations at the global level.

Như Huy

Artistic director of ZeroStation