My name is Maya Nguyen (1996) and I am a Vietnamese-Russian interdisciplinary artist with a focus on sound performance and diasporic making. I gather speech fragments, urban recordings, body movements, migratory routes, sounds imitating nature sounds, and videos of daily life into open-ended works. This practice of material gathering tests out a diasporic framework — a framework of having no single framework. In my live sound essays, installations, and videos, this framework plays out in the interaction of serial images; the mix of different voices; the touch of different bodies.
At the Saari residence, I will continue work on my project “Sound Essay: A Diasporic Making” — a body of research-based live performances dedicated to the ambiguity of listening positions. Sound essays incorporate disparate material sources into a single work as a formal condition of diasporic making. They create listening situations that are slippery — are we listening to a voice, a witness testimony, a foreign accent, or a spoken melody?
The specific sound essay to be developed at Saari, tentatively titled “Gaia Speaks On Channel Two,” will research the local perception and expectation of nature sounds. The soundscape of the surrounding natural environment will be recorded as raw compositional material, while sounds created by objects in the studio will, in turn, be used to re-create sounds of nature. Like a human imitating a bird call to attract the real bird, which hears the fake call and falls in love, this sound essay plays with the fantasy of nature when bird sounds were bird sounds and human sounds did not exist because the human was the listener and the bird, the bird.
This will take the shape of intimate, outdoor performances to one listener at a time, who will hear the work created live through headphones, as well as the external soundscape persistently leaking in. This work brings together threads from previous projects: Planet Blah (Watershed Art & Ecology, Chicago US, 2024); Whisper Wind Water (World Forum For Acoustic Ecology, Florida US, 2023/VCCA, Hanoi VN, 2022); The Sea Like The Desert Doesn’t Quench The Thirst (Murmuration Gallery, Chicago, US 2023).