HOMELANDS

(Vietnam/Sweden/UK)

Date & time: 6pm – Monday, Dec. 2nd  2013

Venue: Manzi – 14 Phan Huy Ich

In the beginning of September 2013, the đàn tranh player Nguyễn Thanh Thủy went to Ngang Nội in the Bắc Ninh Province with Stefan Östersjö and Matthew Sansom from the Landscape Quartet. In Bắc Ninh, both of her parents grew up in the same small village of Ngang Nội, famed for Quan Họ the folk music tradition of love songs that emerge from the province and has had some of its most famous tradition bearers specifically in this little village. With a wish to revisit sites known from childhood and interact with the soundscape of the present day the three musicians worked up on the mountains around the village and on the rice fields. The two works presented at Manzi’s in december draw on material from both settings. In the rice fields where she used to work as a child and catch grasshoppers to grill in the night, Thủy put her đàn tranh upside down to let the rice play it. Up on the mountain, Stefan Östersjö stringed his đàn đáy to three trees and played the instrument together with the wind in the trees. The installations at Manzi’s created by Matthew Sansom and Stefan Östersjö aim at capturing the complexity of the interactions between the musicians and the landscape and of the intense sonorities of the Vietnamese countryside.

Dan day:  Stefan Östersjö

Dan Tranh: Nguyen Thanh Thuy

Installation: Matthew Sansom, Stefan Östersjö