Earth Body Blood Water

08 – 20 Mar 2022
Nhà Sống Project
Alley 404 Phố Bắc Cầu, Ngọc Thụy, Long Biên, Hà Nội
Registration link

From the organizer:

Event Summary:

The Earth Body Blood Water event will use direct education, a multimedia exhibition, and a community ritual performance piece to inspire the protection of women and the restoration of the environment in Hanoi and in the world.

:Medium and theme:

Any/all mediums and art forms including visual art, sculpture, ceramics, textiles, photography, installations, poetry, performance, audio/video submissions are all welcome and encouraged.

Physical art pieces that cannot be shipped or transported can be sent as a high-quality digital file and printed at exhibition-quality in Hanoi.

Art exploring any the following themes is welcome:
– Feminism / ecofeminism
– Violence against women (femicide)
– Environmentalism / environmental exploitation / climate grief (ecocide)
– Grief, protest, sorrow / death
– Joy, celebration of women / life
– The connection between body and land
– The connection between humans and nature / women and nature
– The relationship between violence against women & violence against the environment

Event description:

The indoor/outdoor installation explores the relationship between humans and nature; women and land; femicide and ecocide; violence against women and violence against the environment.

Work celebrating land, womanhood, and healthy human-environmental relations will be exhibited outdoors, integrated into the garden ecosystem, surrounded by lush plant life, lit by sunlight during the day and warm golden light at night.

Work exploring femicide, ecocide, gender violence, protest, climate grief, and mourning will be displayed in a devastated indoor room, through a symbolic “magic portal” that transitions visitors from the World of the Living into the World of the Dead.

In order for visitors to cross into the World of the Dead, they must cut the living flowers growing outdoors and place them on the indoor altar. Eventually, these flowers will all be gone – cut, wilted, and dead. As visitors leave the indoor space, crossing the magic portal back into the outdoor World of the Living, they will be given a seed to plant in its place.

Now the visitor ceases to be merely an onlooker – they are a facilitator, a creator, and a keeper of the World of the Living. Crossing through the magic portal, they move through feeling into symbolic and ritual action, but they will not, of course, get to see the seeds grow and bloom. To take life is instantaneous. To plant seeds is an investment in the future.

The exhibition space will therefore transform over two weeks as the visitors themselves participate in the destruction/restoration of the environment and the death/protection of women: the power of life or death is in our hands.

Background/Problem statement:

The subjugation of women and the subjugation of the environment are linked. The violence of patriarchy that steals women’s lives through femicide is the same force that is stealing our future through ecocide.

Climate emergencies (and loss or theft of land and resources) disproportionately affect women and girls; continued environmental degradation puts women and girls at further and greater risk of violence, exploitation, trafficking, and femicide. The same women who are most vulnerable to environmental violence are also most vulnerable to gender-based violence. Indigenous women, trans women, women in poverty, and colonized women are all the primary victims of the patriarchal logic of ownership, domination, exploitation, force, and greed.

The liberation of women from gender-based violence will come hand in hand with the liberation of the environment when we coordinate together across demographics of geography, ethnicity, race, class, and sexuality to fight patriarchy at its root. The life of every woman in the world depends on us building a new approach to existence and relationship – indeed, the future of the human species and the planet itself depends on it.

Event goals:
– Raise local and international awareness about femicide and violence against women (in Vietnam and globally); educate a local and international audience about issues facing women and the environment in Vietnam
– Create a healing space for climate grief to be felt, processed, and then transmuted into action
– Connect Vietnamese artists (especially women and youth) with a global creative network;
– Inspire and empower people in Hanoi (audience) and internationally (digitally) to take concrete, tangible action to protect women and the environment
– Facilitate the creation of “ecological art” which restores and regenerates the ecosystem as part of its aesthetic;
– Encourage the protection of the environment and the protection of women;
– Promote women’s art/Vietnamese women’s art;
– Facilitate the continuation of the Nhà Sống Project urban farm and community art space (information below) and generate community support for and awareness of the project

In collaboration with:
– Magnitude Zero (Paris) and Dia de las Muertas (international)
– Nhà Sống Project (Hanoi)

About Nhà Sống Project:

Nhà Sống Project is an educational permaculture garden and community arts space with a wide support network of partners, nonprofits, and professionals from creative and entrepreneurial industries around the world. Nhà Sống Project operates on a collaborative structure, bringing professionals and community members together around holistic permaculture principles.

About The Día de las Muertas project:

For centuries, the most extreme form of violence against women had no name. The term femicide emerged to make visible a problem in our societies: the killing of a woman because she is a woman. Violence against women has no borders and femicides are becoming more and more numerous throughout the world, but also in France. Beyond the figures that show us an alarming reality the story of these women is too often passed over in silence.

The Día de las Muertas project initiated in Paris in 2020 by the Magnitude Zero association, aims to give visibility to the victims and to open a dialogue with everyone in order to change morals and mentalities. To this end, we have chosen to organize a collective artistic and cultural installation each year in order to raise awareness of this problem in France and abroad. We are convinced that art and culture are key means of enabling the public to take a sensitive and personal approach to the subject.

The Mexican tradition:

The project is inspired by the tradition of the Mexican Day of the Dead intended to recall and represent a privileged moment of encounter. The ofrendas (offerings) installed between November 1 and 2 are temporary spaces where the world of the living and the world of the dead are brought together. This cultural phenomenon honoring the dead is symbolised in ritual and structures and expressed in an infinite number of ways, many of which are ephemeral in nature.

This tradition therefore seems to us to be a particularly appropriate inspiration for reviving the memory of these murdered women and creating a meeting space around the global problem of gender violence.

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