Radia #1017 - Naufrage: Fleches d'etranges jours; nuits source de liberte by XM Tran

Members of Radia, the international group of independent cultural radio stations, explore new and forgotten ways of making radio.

A live performance recorded in Les Ateliers Magellan, Nantes, France, on the 4th of July 2024.

With: XM Tran, sound, voices, linocut, ink on paper & Barylin Tone, baritone guitar, objects.

"Naufrage". First edition: Fleches d'etranges jours; nuits source de liberte. The book “The Castaways of Barbados” was published in 1904 and describes the accidental arrival of a white family on a Caribbean island. The characters are first horrified by the lack of local comfort, then frightened and fascinated by the “savages” populating the place, as well as amused to kill animals for sport. As a child of a Vietnamese refugee whose ship trajectories are not just accidental mishaps, the book turns into a collection of deeply personal and decolonial poetic works.

As a queer person of Vietnamese descent, XM Tran’s artistic work focuses on the issue of identity, and in particular on the void left by exile, with the need to recreate fictions to repair family memory. By celebrating the diversity of identities of the Vietnamese diaspora, the artist aspires to highlight their ghosts through revolutionary practices such as sound creation, poetry and linocut, between technical mythologies and fantasized landscapes.