‘Tropical Siesta’ is a two-channel video that merges artist Phan Thao Nguyen’s delicate navigations into and around oral and written publicized and occluded histories, and imagined and assumed narratives that have come to settle alongside each other in Vietnam.The film’s subtitle-narrative acts to foreground the images of lush greenery, intense red dusty soil, a sleepy classroom and school courtyard, and scenes of children playfully enacting roles of ‘punishment’. Together, they underscore Nguyen’s own curiousness towards the text authored by French Jesuit missionary, Alexandre de Rhodes in his ‘History of the Kingdom of Tonkin’ as juxtaposition to the landscape of present-day Vietnam. In ‘Tropical Siesta’, Nguyen interweaves narratives of play, poetry and local myth (such as the tale of the Water Goddess) into the film, creating an at once utopic, whimsical and romantic film about a metaphorical drowsiness that affects the colonized tropical regions.
