Dispersed Subjects

Abstract

For more than five years, I have been working with collaborator Victoria Pham on a project titled Re:Sounding. As artist-researchers, our work continues to bring together collaborators, organisations, and very different communities to reinvigorate, reclaim, and rematriate the sounds and musical culture of instruments held in museum and private collections. Our work began with the Dông Sơn drums, a group of Bronze Age instruments that were primarily excavated from the Red River Delta in the north of Vietnam during French occupation and collected from various tribes and cultures throughout Southeast Asia. As the children of boat people, Victoria and I regularly heard stories about these mythical bronze drums. Instead of focusing on the traumas of the war, our families told us stories about fantastical instruments that carried the sound of thunder from the ancient times of the Da: i Viê: t, ancestors to the Vietnamese Kinh majority three thousand years ago. These drums could summon thunderstorms and lightning, simultaneously bringing harvest rains and releasing wild torrents capable of washing away enemy invaders. Despite these stories, our parents had only ever seen archaeological and ethnographic photographs of Dông Sơn drums in old schoolbooks. In the aftermath of decolonial ruptures during the 1950s and 1960s, these drums had by then been largely looted or systematically ‘rescued’ for ethnographic and scientific study elsewhere. It was not until 2016, whilst visiting me during a funded travelling fellowship (from the Samstag Museum of Art and the University of South Australia) that my parents had their first encounter with a Dông Sơn drum. As tourists marking off the must dos of New York City, we happened on a small example of this mythical drum, displayed in the Florence and Herbert Irving Southeast Asian Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. My parents were unlikely to be motivated enough to visit similar museums back in Australia, but in this instance, visiting me during my arts research residency, they were willing to participate in popular high art and culture. Spot lit and arranged alongside other Bronze Age artefacts, this Dông Sơn drum was silently displayed behind thick museum glass. Contradicting the