The Specter of Ancestors Becoming (2019) is a four-channel video installation based on a collaboration with Vietnamese-Senegalese descendants of a group of men known as thetirailleurs sénégalais, or Senegalese riflemen—colonial troops not only of Senegalese origin who fought for France in the first half of the twentieth century. During the war and after the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, hundreds of Vietnamese women and their children migrated to West Africa with Senegalese husbands who had been stationed in Indochina. Many other soldiers left their wives and took only their children, while still others took mixed or Vietnamese children not their own and raised them in Senegal without connection to their origins. Nguyen collaborated with members of the Vietnamese community in Senegal to write and stage imagined conversations with or between their parents or grandparents that highlight nuances in strategies of remembering. The descendants performed the roles of narrators and actors.
