KVT on the British Council exhibition ‘In a City'

Hanoian Epiphanies

In a City at the Information and Exhibition Center at 45 Trang Tien must be the most visited cultural exhibition around. Perhaps its lucky because its in the middle of busy Trang Tien’s bookshop and ice-cream strip but on week day afternoon it had a steady stream of Vietnamese and foreign visitors looking at it and if you gauge the success of an exhibition by the length of time people explore each exhibit or installation, then In a City really is a spectacular success.

It’s a British Council initiative and was conceived from a James Joyce-ean idea of portraying a moment of epiphany in the lives of 15 Dubliners, special moments that involve self understanding or personal illumination. In Joyce’s short  stories the 15 characters are from the middle classes and some stories are narrated through the eyes of young children, others adolescents and mature adults

So from this idea evolved an Hanoian project where 6 writers teamed with 6 photographers would have 3 months to present a visual and brief textual account of a part of some Hanoians’ lives, a philosophy, a hope, a dream, a reality. In one instance a place was chosen.

It is a success, not because it deals in epiphanies, which it could well have done with the wide range of characters it envelopes and their differing ages, gender and socioeconomic status, but because it is a wonderful attempt to biography a city. I only hope that the book that is to be released in May and that can be seen in one of the video presentations, is not an end but a beginning. I can imagine the archival result of the project becoming an indefinitely ongoing one that would eventually have thousands of characters on an accessible data base.

Hardly any place in the world has collected oral histories of its people and too often history is only recounted through the eyes of a particular dominant group. This post Joyce-ean project could become one of the most democratic compilations of sociology and  history anywhere.

Its not perfect nor does it need to be, it only has to have intelligent, objective and unbiased compilers.

Congratulations. It’s was a brilliant conception, a succesful birth and will hopefully have a happy childhood, grow into adolesence and reach a mature old age.

Catch it while you can!