Our Soil Or Your Soil

Ambigram earth installation on Humboldt Forum’s courtyard

video documentation, stencil installation in exhibition space

2023

In the Vietnamese language, many words can have more than 2 meanings. “Roads” and “sugar”, for example, are homonyms written thus: “đường” . The word “đất” in Vietnamese, which in English could be translated as “earth”, also has many interpretations: it can be "earth", but it can also mean “land” or “land property”, and it is used to build the first half of the word “nation". “Earth”, or rather “đất” in the Vietnameses' minds carries symbolic meaning for national identity. These ambivalences play a central role in “Our Soil Or Your Soil”- a performance/installation part of the exhibition "Mingled Living Forces" in Humboldt Forum. In this piece, ambigrams of the words "shareholding", "ownership", "possession" and "thingification" are created to be read from both ways, but on the other hand also cryptic and challenging to read. These words appear in different moments throughout Aimé Césaire’s “Discourse on Colonialism” and various post colonial texts. They are presented as rotational ambigrams to challenge the way people normally read, how one word can be seen from both perspectives and how one perceives the meaning of these definitions. The words will eventually be faded away by rain, wind or footsteps and all these definitions will collide with each other, erasing the borders between what were formed.