My Vietnam
Vietnam as a place had been depicted numerous times, envisaged and reinvented and at times betrayed. From the crossroads where cinema, literature and photography have been merging for decades the under layer of the country’s progressive conscience had been created, which makes it difficult to picture Vietnam through different eyes. Vietnam means imagining the place from afar, it means Asia as a indistinguishable geographic mass, somewhere else par excellence. For years its name had been associated with American military intervention and the country’s search of its national identity.
My Vietnam by Gianpaolo Arena is not represented as a chronicle of a country but is depicted as an experience throughout the trip, a documentation of one’s changing way of observation. There are many layers of emotions and representations during this search, such as one’s gaze at the things, clash with the new, divided in the immediate reactions and the iconic memory which take with us though this travel and in the end all merging to the one photographic style.
The images are not focused on one particular thing in order to frame the roads, the corners, the inland and the faces met through the trip. We see the tangles of the electrical cables at the street junctions, the crowd and the scooters which fill up the cities, but are distant presences and never looked upon how different they may seem. The images evoke other emotions in which the unknown is described through a language where the subjects are inhaled through photography.
For decades the documentary photography has brought the new representations of the ordinary, giving it the new possibility to questions the places and its stories in the small towns, big cities, places in general. It is a style which many artists have in common, and which can be noticed in some parts of My Vietnam too, such as the use of colours, distance of the observation, depiction and the relationship with the environment.
Text curated by Fabio Severo