decolonized [love]
zine
Note before you proceed:
1) this zine is a work in-progress, the final product will be in print maybe
2) this online version includes my reflection and for-now-not-so-personal anecdotes from traveling mostly Denmark, then Stockholm and Berlin
3) i passionately recommend viewing it from your desktop - full screen
4) several design elements are interactive, so if something is hidden from view, try tapping or dragging them
1) this zine is a work in-progress, the final product will be in print maybe
2) this online version includes my reflection and for-now-not-so-personal anecdotes from traveling mostly Denmark, then Stockholm and Berlin
3) i passionately recommend viewing it from your desktop - full screen
4) several design elements are interactive, so if something is hidden from view, try tapping or dragging them
front cover
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When the artist Dorothy Iannone went on a boat trip to Reykjavík and fell passionately in love with Dieter Roth, her life changed entirely. She called it, “[the] journey which seems to have made all other journeys possible.” Dorothy got divorced, left her comfortable life in the US, moved country. This was when her art flourished into the lifelong quest to achieve ecstatic unity, or “becoming one with another” by way of erotic love. Iannone matured to herself by exploring how she wanted to love and be loved beyond the voyage to Reykjavík.
It isn’t an overstatement when I conclude that my trip to Europe was analogous to Dorothy’s, with elements of ecstatic union, perspective-widening encounters, and personal challenges. My old inner life shattered in the quake of this new consciousness towards love and the self. Nothing could remain business-as-usual when one has witnessed more glimpses of one’s truths.
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During the trip, I realized that I was colonized. The parameter of my colonial mentality went beyond my nationality as a Vietnamese. I was colonized in love.
I cannot pinpoint the exact moment when this realization burgeoned in me. I did start a list, beginning with the obvious reasons:
1. I was in a study program whose subject matter was literally Colonialism, Culture, and Why Public Art Matters;
2. I was reading bell hooks and Alice Miller;
3. I saw this artpiece, joined that dance, hung out with all of these people and she said this and they did so and we kissed and he said that...
The list went on until I felt profoundly silly. Why must I make sense of how I arrived at an insight? Am I trying to convince someone? Why do we encourage the mechanical approach to emotional breakthroughs?
Exploring many of my past artworks, I see a child reporting back to her authority figure, be it her parent, her teacher, her lover, her government, her God... She created through reports and her art were sensible, just like Dorothy’s recount in “Lists (IV)” (1968) all of her lovers before Dieter. The record was given rather dispassionately with the monotonous black ink on white paper (shown above).
My art sometimes resembled the parts of me that were dead. Creativity is the medium where my topography of love naturally conveyed, so I understood at once how trapped I had been feeling in my relational life. I quietly discerned this truth by witnessing liberating art.
In this first chapter called “the colonized”, I examine the language of colonialism in love, drawing from my personal life and close inspection of the daily language in contemporary society.
I cannot pinpoint the exact moment when this realization burgeoned in me. I did start a list, beginning with the obvious reasons:
1. I was in a study program whose subject matter was literally Colonialism, Culture, and Why Public Art Matters;
2. I was reading bell hooks and Alice Miller;
3. I saw this artpiece, joined that dance, hung out with all of these people and she said this and they did so and we kissed and he said that...
The list went on until I felt profoundly silly. Why must I make sense of how I arrived at an insight? Am I trying to convince someone? Why do we encourage the mechanical approach to emotional breakthroughs?
Exploring many of my past artworks, I see a child reporting back to her authority figure, be it her parent, her teacher, her lover, her government, her God... She created through reports and her art were sensible, just like Dorothy’s recount in “Lists (IV)” (1968) all of her lovers before Dieter. The record was given rather dispassionately with the monotonous black ink on white paper (shown above).
My art sometimes resembled the parts of me that were dead. Creativity is the medium where my topography of love naturally conveyed, so I understood at once how trapped I had been feeling in my relational life. I quietly discerned this truth by witnessing liberating art.
In this first chapter called “the colonized”, I examine the language of colonialism in love, drawing from my personal life and close inspection of the daily language in contemporary society.
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the “i love you so i do this for your own good” mentality
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the “i love you so i’m suffering” mentality
By the time of writing, the 1st song that was recommended to me when I searched “Billboard Top 100” on Youtube was STAY by Justin Bieber and The Kid LAROI.
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the “i love you so i own you” mentality
My cohort looked into public art and their thoughtful values while our hostel’s bar jammed music like the above throughout the night. There must be so much cognitive dissonance thus desensitization when we live in a world that advocates for equality and goes on to sing about enslaving others in the name of love. Even secondhand consumption wears us down.
Niels Helveg Petersen, the former Danish Minister of Foreign Affairs, rejected demands of an official apology for the Danish participation in the transatlantic slave trade. He said, “I cannot see what’s right about people who have had nothing to do with slavery apologising to people who have not experienced slavery.” He only needs to listen deeply to the love songs that are played on the radio to realize that it will take a long time to heal, for both the colonizers and the colonized.
Niels Helveg Petersen, the former Danish Minister of Foreign Affairs, rejected demands of an official apology for the Danish participation in the transatlantic slave trade. He said, “I cannot see what’s right about people who have had nothing to do with slavery apologising to people who have not experienced slavery.” He only needs to listen deeply to the love songs that are played on the radio to realize that it will take a long time to heal, for both the colonizers and the colonized.
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In Aarhus, a professor asked me how had the [Vietnam] war affected my parents and I said they couldn’t feel sad. Many of us have lost the ability to be where we are at, to feel what we feel whether they are comfortable or painful. This is the aftermath of having experienced violence. The result is partial blindness from reality because if we can only admit the “appropriate feelings”, we lose touch with reality & the self.
But almost everywhere I go, I can discover my parents’ impassive eyes - the collective repression and suppression of sufferings. Sometimes when I dilute my days with fear and productivity, those eyes stare at me right from the mirror as I paste contact lens on.
I remember hearing Karen said that Denmark as a nation was engineered to the identity of benevolence which sustained through the denial of a violent colonial past; Thus, it denies meaningful discourse and transformation for the hurt and oppressed communities. I want to take our discourse a step further by pointing our gaze of compassion inward to a nation of “happiness” that readily denies their very ability to hold sufferings. The sight of suffering in others would be unbearable if we don’t yet have the emotional willingness to witness our own. Because what we cannot see and empathize in ourself, we cannot see and tolerate in others.
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Somewhere along the trip, I started to wonder with persistence What have I been hiding from myself. I remember weeping the whole way home after a cacao ceremony that was followed by ecstatic dancing. My heart was wide open in sacred communal so I could let down my defence a bit more, just enough to recognize my unwholesome habits and attachments as the result of a personal history of pain. Being in the presence of liberating beings helped bring out through contrast the muddy and suffocating.
But almost everywhere I go, I can discover my parents’ impassive eyes - the collective repression and suppression of sufferings. Sometimes when I dilute my days with fear and productivity, those eyes stare at me right from the mirror as I paste contact lens on.
I remember hearing Karen said that Denmark as a nation was engineered to the identity of benevolence which sustained through the denial of a violent colonial past; Thus, it denies meaningful discourse and transformation for the hurt and oppressed communities. I want to take our discourse a step further by pointing our gaze of compassion inward to a nation of “happiness” that readily denies their very ability to hold sufferings. The sight of suffering in others would be unbearable if we don’t yet have the emotional willingness to witness our own. Because what we cannot see and empathize in ourself, we cannot see and tolerate in others.
Somewhere along the trip, I started to wonder with persistence What have I been hiding from myself. I remember weeping the whole way home after a cacao ceremony that was followed by ecstatic dancing. My heart was wide open in sacred communal so I could let down my defence a bit more, just enough to recognize my unwholesome habits and attachments as the result of a personal history of pain. Being in the presence of liberating beings helped bring out through contrast the muddy and suffocating.
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Realizing what we have lost is the first step to regaining it.
Without going into personal details (for the time being), my defences shed with each tear that mourned the death of my old life. A dear friend told me that I was called for A Relationship Revolution. I cried myself into the newfound liberation and morphed a fresh reality. My body still feared the violence that might strike me as I declared my boundaries, my truer self. But larger than the fear was the unwavering knowing that this is the way forward. It has been done before, I have witnessed it in others, in books, in galleries, in people, in my history and the memories of my cells.
When we cry with willingness and curiosity, our tears can finally do their job, which is to cleanse and relieve. I wrote in my diary, “wow, I understand more deeply what it means to hold sufferings now...”
Without going into personal details (for the time being), my defences shed with each tear that mourned the death of my old life. A dear friend told me that I was called for A Relationship Revolution. I cried myself into the newfound liberation and morphed a fresh reality. My body still feared the violence that might strike me as I declared my boundaries, my truer self. But larger than the fear was the unwavering knowing that this is the way forward. It has been done before, I have witnessed it in others, in books, in galleries, in people, in my history and the memories of my cells.
When we cry with willingness and curiosity, our tears can finally do their job, which is to cleanse and relieve. I wrote in my diary, “wow, I understand more deeply what it means to hold sufferings now...”
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I conclude my trip with a deeper dedication to build a vocabulary of (decolonized) love, starting with the language that’s inferred in my personal relationships.
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the vocabulary of decolonized love
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Dear reader, I hope you cry and smile often. From there is our collective ability to love and be true.