Tuan Andrew Nguyen. The Specter of Ancestors Becoming.

Soldiers from West Africa

In the 1940s France sent many colonial units to Indochina. Among them were the tirailleurs sénégalais, West African soldiers serving in the French army. They were sent to put down Vietnamese uprisings for independence.

Some of these soldiers married Vietnamese women. They had children in Vietnam. After the French defeat at Điện Biên Phủ in 1954, hundreds of Vietnamese women followed their husbands and children to Africa. They started over in Senegal, in an unfamiliar country, with a different language and a different climate.

Some soldiers did not bring their wives. They took only the children. Those children grew up in Senegal, sometimes knowing nothing of their origins. Half a family stayed on the other side of the ocean and slowly became a gap no one mentioned.

More than half a century later, the descendants of these families still live in Senegal. They are a small community carrying two bloodlines, two histories, and many questions no one has answered.

Imagined conversations

Tuan Andrew Nguyen, born in 1976 in Vietnam, worked with members of the Vietnamese community in Senegal. He did not make an interview documentary. Together they wrote and staged imagined conversations, with parents, with grandparents, or between those who had died.

These conversations never took place. Perhaps a child never asked their mother why she left home. Perhaps a grandchild never knew what their grandfather thought when he held a rifle in a distant country. The work gives them a place to ask, and to imagine the answers.

The result is The Specter of Ancestors Becoming, completed in 2019: a four channel video installation with 7.1 surround sound, 28 minutes long. Viewers stand among four screens and hear voices from several directions, as if standing in a family whose members are never in the same room.

What the work brings forward is not a truer version of history. It is different ways of remembering. Each descendant holds a piece, and each piece is remembered in its own way, sometimes at odds with the others.

From Sharjah to San Francisco

The work premiered at the Sharjah Biennial in 2019. The same year it had its US premiere in the exhibition SOFT POWER at SFMOMA, which acquired it for its collection in 2020. In 2022 it was shown at the Dakar Biennale, returning to the country where these families live.

That return matters. A story of Senegalese and Vietnamese people, told in Senegal, before audiences who might be neighbours of the people on screen. The work is no longer a view from afar.

Earlier, Tuan Andrew Nguyen was a member of The Propeller Group, the collective behind The Living Need Light, the Dead Need Music, about funerals in southern Vietnam. Both works touch the dead. But where the collective's film is a farewell full of music, this one is a call in the other direction: the living asking the dead to come back and answer what was never asked.

The title speaks of a ghost taking shape. Ancestors here are not fixed faces on an altar. They are being rebuilt, line by line, by people who carry their blood but never met them.