Living Echoes. Vietnamese music, divided histories, and community voices

Her research focuses on the involvement of Vietnamese communities in Berlin. She aims to transform the audio recordings from the Berlin Phonogramm archive into a living, dynamic archive that is supported by the community. It explores how diasporic communities reconnect with their musical heritage.

As part of the Guest Room, Nhi Duong invites you to a listening session where the archive recordings can be heard in public for the first time. She will be working together with performance artist Hany Tea and other Vietnamese people living in Berlin.


In January 1954, the foreign ministers of the Soviet Union, the United States, Great Britain and France met in Berlin and decided to convene an international conference in Geneva to decide on the restoration of peace in Indochina, including Vietnam. The Geneva Accords established the 17th parallel as a temporary separation between North and South Vietnam.


From this point onwards, two different political and social systems developed in the two regions – the North was united in its commitment to building socialism, while the South, with the government in Saigon and the support of the USA, established the Republic of Vietnam. This led to the emergence of two genres: nhạc đỏ (red music), which represented the North, and nhạc vàng (yellow/golden music), which represented the South. Two different ideologies are embedded in the lyrics and rhythms, pointing to two very different perceptions of Vietnamese origins, war and fatherland.


During her CoMuse fellowship, Nhi Duong considers the Vietnamese song recordings held in the museums’ collection not only as a closed collection, but also as historical evidence and resources for the mutual contribution of contemporary Vietnamese communities in Berlin through digital mediation. How do they interact, interpret, improvise and integrate as cultural subjects with the songs and folklore they have produced?


PARTICIPANTS

Duong Doan Tuyet Nhi is a cultural worker and organizer based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Her work centers on the intersections of anthropology, Indigenous knowledge, public engagement, and art.

With the project Reimagining Intangible Heritage in Museums: A Participatory Approach to Cultural Cosmology, Nhi seeks to explore ways of bringing intangible heritage—particularly folk songs—out of museum archives and into dialogue with the contemporary Vietnamese diaspora community in Berlin. Her research poses the following questions:
How do different generations of Vietnamese-German individuals relate to and interpret their heritage? What role can digital technologies play in making sound archives more accessible and collaborative? How can community voices be integrated into institutional sound collections? Through participatory methods that combine digital platforms with physical workshops, the project aims to forge connections between historical sound archives and the voices of present-day communities.


Hany Tea is a trained political scientist, a passionate performance artist, and a member of the Mutating Kinship Lab—an art collective laboratory of the Asian diaspora—as well as of DAMN* (Deutsche Asiat*innen Make Noise), a political platform made up of activists from the Asian diaspora in Germany.


- free admission, no ticket required
- 12 years and older
- English
- Mechanical Arena in the Foyer
- Part of: Guestroom