“Wandering Salon”
untitled x KAUM Film+++festival Berlin 2023
3th – 13th May / 1st – 9th July / 4th – 14th October 2023
supported by Banying Belin and Hauptstadtkulturfonds (Berlin Senate)
"An engagement is a promise, an arrangement, an agreement - even a dispute... Engagement is defined as (1) a promise to wed; (2) a plan to meet someone or do something at a particular time; (3) the start of a military fight; and (4) involvement. In all instances, the term points at contingency, liminality: engagement is a process, a reckoning with your skins.” - Việt Lê, Return Engagements: Contemporary arts’ traumas of modernity and history in Sài Gòn and Phnom Penh (Duke UP, 2021)
unthaitled x KAUM Film+++festival 2023 Wandering Salon is a collaborative project between the collectives unthaitled, Soydivision and curators spanning film screenings, performances, workshops, talks and other activities. It departs from a conceptual space reminiscent of the salon, the room in a house where guests – friends and strangers alike – are welcomed and entertained. These places exist in households all over Southeast Asia (ห้องโถงเคลื่อนที่, Salon dạo, Salon Keliling), as temporary communal spaces of encounters that fosters conversations and new forms of togetherness and solidarity.
The film program – a journey across time, with films both from the past and present – features a collectively curated selection of short and feature films from the region as well as by diasporic filmmakers. It pivots around complex and interrelated theme clusters such as origin mythologies, love stories, urbanization, homemaking, future engineering, colonial extractivism, and familial ties. We conceive of films as conversation openers rather than finished statements from the terrain of fixed opinions, while the accompanying program of performances, talks and workshops aim to foster an ongoing process of encounter and exchange between predominantly Thai, Indonesian and Vietnamese diaspora communities in Berlin.
Our program happens across months of May, July and October at various locations across Berlin such as Sinema Transtopia, Ufer Studios, and other independent community spaces.
This round table conversation brings together the six curators of Wandering Salon: Sarnt Utamachote, Rosalia Namsai Engchuan, Gugi Gumilang, Lisabona Rahman, Hai Nam Nguyen and Phuong Phan. It aims at bringing together diverse Southeast Asian communities in Berlin (especially Thai, Indonesian and Vietnamese) via the lens of cinema, archival memories, shared heritage and safe space. It also mentions recent history of art-activist groups made by local creatives in Berlin, fighting for visibility and rights for self-organization.
Sarnt: Wandering Salon. Let’s start with our experiences with these kinds of festivals, which are not the usual Asian-related event that fosters stereotypes rather than critically engaging with them, of which we have so many in Germany. What kinds of projects were you involved in before this?
Lisabona: I experienced film festivals in Indonesia in the early stage of my career, in the early 2000s as an extension of the movement for political freedom. I feel that a festival allows us to co-create and play together, while making lots of space for encountering new people, new languages, supporting each other’s struggles and celebrating achievements. I believe it’s a form of pleasant political communal act, maybe a bit like a pride parade where we can show who we are, what our concerns are and all the energy come together and manifest as a festival. As a film programmer and archivist, a festival is a safe and brave space of experimenting together with the audience, saying “Hi, let’s take a journey together.” For the journey to be interesting, for me it’s always necessary to go through space and time. That’s what I really enjoy in the process of Wandering Salon, all of you seem to glide effortlessly through places, time and languages when proposing films to share with our audience in Berlin. I also appreciate very much that all of you bring real political discussions to the table as a person with Southeast Asian background and knowledge – or even personal experience – about migration stories. As a new member of the diaspora community, I’ve learned a great deal from this programming process.
Phuong: Unlike all of you, I do not have experience in organizing such film festivals. I also don’t have a background as a filmmaker or researcher on films like many of you. It was exciting for me to do this project because it means more to me than just organizing a festival in a city like Berlin. It is about creating alternatives, opening spaces for intimacy and stories, through the films but also through the conversations we have together, between curators but also with the audience and others who are involved in this project. It is a chance for me to experience collective labor, collective joy and collective empowerment which is not taking place often in the cultural industry in which we are all part of.
When we came together, I wanted to grab the opportunity to create with all of you a platform where we can show films which haven’t been shown in established festivals such as the Berlinale. This also means to bring together filmmakers who don’t have a seat at the table to talk about their perspectives on socially relevant topics which affect all of us. I think we all agreed that we wanted to create the kind of understories which have been told but have not found enough audience to listen to yet. The second idea comes from my interest in some film productions from the 1970s–1990s, especially from Vietnam which deal with the Cold War, a topic which is still dominated by Western narrative. Personally, I am very interested in the question of how the region Southeast Asia is geopolitically affected by the Cold War which in turn had crucial impacts on the people’s lives in the region and also on those who left SEA and have to build up a life which we call diaspora today.
Rosalia: To me, growing up in Germany I always had this desire to learn more about Southeast Asia, Thailand in particular. And independent and art films back then were wonderful portals to access these other worlds that were also in some way part of me. I volunteered at the Asian Film Festival Berlin 2017 organized by korientation and my wonderful mentors and friends Arnika Fuhrmann and Feng-Mei Heberer from the academic world. Back then I participated in a filmmaking workshop and I kept on making experimental documentaries since then. Cinematic languages just really offer so much space to think through things. Then when we met Sarnt, we organized screenings and eventually our Film Festival Series and filmmaking workshops.
Gugi: In the past, I actually have worked on the concept of KAUM, a festival we organized with Soydivision. Basically, the idea was to find a way to work with filmmakers working in and about Southeast Asia who, due to structural racism in the film industry, do not have a chance to compete internationally. And as we have a kind of platform we can give opportunities to filmmakers who don’t have the chance to show their work outside the regions. I think it’s really important for them. I think it’s also the core idea of KAUM, alongside the wish of freedom or artistic expression from the region. So the diasporas in Europe can also get updated to what’s happening Southeast Asia.
Phuong: The last point you make is very interesting for me. I also think that it would be interesting to “update” diasporic communities in Europe on the concerns and struggles of people in Southeast Asia, finding a way to bring them together in a discussion about certain concepts such as love, family, motherhood, femininity and masculinity among others concepts which we all can related to but do have different approaches and understanding of.
Gugi: Yeah, I think when we prepare for this festival, we watch a lot of works which deal with many social issues which people are concerned with, either people in diaspora or in Southeast Asia.
Sarnt: Gugi, you have done such formats with others in your project KAUM, right? Can you tell us more about it, what does KAUM actually mean? How did you all end up with that name?
Gugi: First of all, KAUM is a community and it can be translated or understood as “marginalized community”. In the German language, KAUM also means “rare” or “a few”. By naming the project KAUM, we are interested in films which are on the side of marginalized communities.
Sarnt: Yeah I remember it was at Oyoun. Oyoun is one of the project spaces run by POC migrants, they focus on post-colonial discourses and have done many projects in which we are involved in, such as Sinema Transtopia/Bi’bak or SAVVY. And then you are all a part of this Soydivision collective right? How did you come to know Soydivision Gugi?
Gugi: I think it started with Ariel and Ogi who asked me to organize a panel based on my thesis – I have written about collective memory, which is shaped by communism in Indonesia. I also work a lot with the film industry as well, so that’s why when we got a chance, I proposed that we should do a film festival together. Unfortunately, after I left Soydivision nobody took care of it. That was the journey.
Sarnt: I remember when I went to that event in Tempelhof, there was a memorial, right. I think it was you talking about communism. Many collectives started in 2018 and 2019. That was the time when we were kind of like, “Oh, let’s go to urban space and do something, intervene in the urban space and invent a lot of cool formats.” I think that was the time that stayed in my memory, that we had so much hope and energy in the beginning somehow.
Phuong: During these years 2018-2019, I also felt that the city Berlin is ready for those formats. Many events popped up more often than usual, either organized by state-run institutions or project spaces and cultural workers started to think about their own practices in the arts and culture in general. It felt like the time was coming for alternative narratives and people in communities felt the urgency to express themselves, often questioning institutional formats and practices, empowering each other to counter structural racism. It was the beginning of structural changes coming from those who have been marginalized for such a long time.
Nam: On the contrary, these kinds of events didn’t happen much in Saxony until the past year. I mean, I used to live in Magdeburg and Halle, and there’s a very big Vietnamese diaspora. But there wasn’t any space in the cultural landscape for us. It could be the lack of Vietnamese or Asian people working in this field in the region, but mainly the cultural system there wasn’t ready for us. There’s still so much to do and it’s important to connect and form a collective like these in order for spaces in smaller regions to sprout.
Rosalia: It was exactly the same for me growing up in the South of Germany, in Baden Württemberg. The imagination of Asian-ness was very distorted and stereotype defined. And this was hard for me growing up to just have this absolute absence of aspirational role models. This changed when I moved to Berlin and I got in touch with works by Asian artists and filmmakers and it really gave me this whole new horizon of possibility. I think things are slowly changing and through social media the younger generations have this kind of exposure and access much earlier.
Gugi: Yeah I think that we kind of feel that we can speak out. Also, in Berlin we can speak out on topics which we cannot discuss freely in our countries. It just feels like you can go to this community or this collective where many have built up a safe space for us to speak. We are bonded together because we know that we are on the same boat, and we can talk about anything. It was really a good start in these spaces in Berlin especially.
Sarnt: Yes. This makes me think of one of the feature films we are going to show, Tiong Bahru Social Club. Maybe you can say something about this film?
Gugi: I feel that everything, especially the society structure has been always formed by the people who are in power. The social notion has always been structured by the people who have power basically. It feels like this psychological manipulation and also the propaganda that is decided by the people who have power, so it’s just kind of turned into a term like social engineering and so on.
Sarnt: I think it’s also related to how diasporas somehow sometimes internalize this concrete social structure, right? It also goes deeper into the topic of happiness, or this “forced” happiness. This will lead to Rosalia’s film Complicated Happiness but in a sense of collectively being together and trying to make good things for society that can also be a toxic thing that some diaspora groups keep within themselves. This sort of economic migrant, good migrant sort of situation.
Rosalia: Yeah I guess the film can be imagined as what you said, this notion of happiness is loaded in a way. It’s often defined by the government and by ideology. It is almost like even then when you leave the country and you become part of the diaspora somewhere else it becomes almost a burden because it’s assumed that happiness is something you need to achieve in life but the definition of what that is – it is not free and often it is influenced by the regime, the state and the school education. Sometimes, it’s internally already so messed up with these whole notions of “Asian values” and that’s something that people need to navigate.
I think Tiong Bahru Social Club provides a very interesting way of spiraling it forward. Maybe our leaders don’t know what happiness is and we don’t know what it is. So let’s look at data and let artificial intelligence kind of define it, like outsource this very elusive goal. In the end, it is negotiated in a very comedic way, a very comedic approach on a very serious topic. And obviously we all know it is fiction but we are also not that far from that reality. This work will definitely stick with you and kind of like, make you question a lot of assumptions, when it comes to this whole idea and notions of happiness.
Phuong: Totally, the film shows that the idea of happiness is completely governed from those in power. It goes further and shows how our (sexual) desires are also engineered and calculated by the system that also dictates feelings which have to be fulfilled, otherwise one would be kicked off of the community. Tiong Bahru Social Club is mimicking our societies which are driven by capitalism where the meaning of being happy is also completely capitalized and the right of being sad, vulnerable, anger or any other feelings are not allowed to exist.
Sarnt: I think that also kind of reflects the film program that we have, not happiness but origins, motherhood and love. And one step back was sort of, a part of the initiative is what we have, which is unthaitled, that was a project in which I, you, Rosalia and other people were involved. It is good to remember that this sort of festival was a kind of collaboration between two sides that wanted to hopefully merge some forces together. Maybe not that kind of “power” but sort of what we have achieved or the perspective we have on this discourse that we just mentioned. For example, even just on this aspect of happiness. In the context of the diaspora in Germany, I think for us we started from this festival that we did together in 2020.
Rosalia: Yes, after the screening events that you organized in 2019 (having Berlin premiere of the films like Malila: The Farewell Flower), leading to that. Maybe it’s also a bit of a different perspective because I grew up in Germany, so kind of a bit of a different experience. For example Gugi who knows what it is to be in Indonesia and not be able to speak about certain topics . I was in Germany and I was kinda like, able to speak about everything – even though that’s also not really true. Because average German people maybe don’t care about these things too much – what is going on politically in Thailand, or what’s going on within the Thai diaspora within Germany. So it’s important to have this kind of counterpoint. I think we were engaging with toxic stereotypes that exist strongly within Germany. I feel that this was necessary back then but we have evolved so much from that. From trying to fight against german stereotypes, to really create this space for us and for the people within the diaspora; to collaborate with a collective like Soydivision but also with people who work on similar topics. So I almost feel this going beyond Thailand and the second edition of the festival where we screen films from all over Southeast Asia and the diasporas, now collaborating on the film festival. It kind of almost feels like the collective and what we are doing evolved in a way toward community focus. It feels very natural and it is a good process of development.
Sarnt: I think it’s sort of also how we involved other people in this edition and hopefully it will continue to be even more. But it also started with us experimenting, showing Vietnamese and Cambodian films, before we got burned out last year. Basically it was the first time that, a part from our Thai focus program, we moved it towards our neighbors. We showed The Tree House (Truong Minh Quy), The Long Walk (Mattie Do) and The Golden Slumbers (Davy Chou) and the audiences that came and the feedback were great. They also did not expect this. At the same time our activist colleagues from the Vietnamese-German diaspora started creating their own film workshops (such as Dreh’s Um). I feel there was sort of a sign to know that “ok maybe in my own naïve intuition that we should come together and do things together rather than split it up in groups of people identifying with their former nation-states, or “countries” we are responsible for. I think this is why Nam and Phuong joined this whole picture. We worked together before in the project “Where is my karaoke” in Leipzig and beyond.
Nam: Well I think, my curatorial guidelines for this process is to try to find films which don’t belong to the mainstream taste, films which aren’t going to the big film festivals. Often they give us different perspectives or open subjects which most European audiences don’t really care about or acknowledge. I try to look from the diaspora perspective, to find why we have certain values like we are having now and where they come from. Especially when I saw the film Soapy Faggy (Phạm Nguyễn Anh Tú). It was so Vietnamese that I couldn’t describe it better with words. I talked with Tu a few days ago on how he came up with this idea that’s so kitsch but in a way portrayed the image of LGBT community in a very Vietnamese way, you know. It’s the kitsch element that represents, without designer clothes, or the best makeup or go along with the trendy standard from the West. In a way people live with what they have and make statements out of it. This may leave a little bit of a bad connotation for some, but it is also very unique that we like to combine our culture and our standards and sexual orientation into this image. I think we are still heavily influenced by the standard images of LGBT communities of the West. But we just make them more fun and more crazy under our own circumstances. Most (SEA) queer films in Germany still try to dig in the typical cliches to match the market. We in Southeast Asia don’t deal with this. We live under a totally circumstance, where most of us are not protected by the law, or still fight for. We are not like them; the biggest problem wasn’t about coming out or how to maintain a relationship in this society with options relationship models, which is kind of a matter here. For us, our values are more about like yeah, how can we deal with our families or how can we live together without anyone’s invading our space, you know? Much like “Wandering Salon” – it is less about self representation and celebration, it’s more subtle about how to be together in this chaos of traditions and modern life, without looking for confirmation.
Lisabona: I totally share Nam’s feeling about artistic expression or festival programming in our Southeast Asian reality often means making or defining space for collectivity rather than individuality. I want to bring up another aspect of collectivity. Whenever I watch Southeast Asian films, national borders can disappear and identities overlap. I always catch a word I understand or gestures I recognize. The feeling of kinship and familiarity have always been strong. I believe that this comes from the fact that in Southeast Asia we are a mix of similar heritage and we share experiences as colonized people, both in a sense of concrete occupation or cultural imperialism. That’s why it’s interesting to also bring archival films into our programming and propose new ways of bonding by memorializing together. I am interested to see what kind of memory we can put together about Southeast Asia, like a big collage. This is a practice that’s not easy to realize back in Southeast Asia because a lot of aspects of history are censored and dangerous to memorialize. On the other hand, we need to be aware about the need to deal with triggering trauma, since our diaspora community is also made up of people who had to leave for survival or live in exile. I am sure films like Hara Factory Worker’s Struggle, Aladin, and Wandering Circus, when seen by an intergenerational audience, will bring different effects ranging from exciting encounter of the unknown to memories of repression or conflict.
Sarnt: That’s a really good point you brought up. I think it’s perhaps how it ends up being sort of a wandering salon and sort of you are trying to figure out the way to come together with all these differences but also without following this pattern of multicultural, multi-ethnic diversity, we are different kinds of thinking. but more like to find this space of common but also unpacking things together. That’s how we try to figure out how to merge mother tongues and this sort of salon where it’s a place of encounter. But before this we also have other names like foods that we all share, have different names for it but nothing really worked out before. Nam, you have not worked in this field before; you are more in exhibition curation and history archive. Did you see something lacking or missing in that scene? Like a place of community?
Nam: Well I think the nice thing about joining this project is that I bring my previous experience and I try to look for a different view rather than repeating the mainstream. Especially with oral history, I realized that certain topics that we have, like mythologies or love stories or mothers, these are kind of private and in a way it also belongs to oral history because people share topics which are not concerning here in Germany and films like Mother (Vorakorn Ruetaivanichkul), we have very different values here than in Europe. People with dementia here would maybe be sent to a care facility but for us it’s not a question. Even the word “Altersheim” doesn’t really exist in our culture. We take care of our parents, in a way, this is also oral history, because we were taught and grew up with stories , narratives like this. It’s another point of view, narrative about what is care, sharing these experiences about taking care of family members. These situations also exist here within the diaspora.
Also in the case of the film Wandering Circus by Viet Linh, we rediscovered our history, which didn’t really exist in my/our knowledge. The film was directed by a female director and censored in its own country for a very long time because the state thought it might portray a negative image of politics and religion. But time has changed, it was so refreshing to see this film, especially to realize that Vietnamese art history still has a lot to be documented and researched. The country went through different wars to achieve a certain stability and through that process many artworks and historical treasures disappeared, stolen, censored or bought out of the country. Most of which leave no official trace. Without oral history and exchanging knowledge with older generations we would not know where to find them. I still have a vague memory about this film from my childhood and didn’t understand this film until now. At that time it was anchored in my childish mind as a magic and somehow little creepy film. We heard stories about gods and demons and approached them with respect. Wandering Circus opens, after 35 years, even more contemporary debates on morals, the politics of natural resources, the relationship between human and nature, as well as between different ethnic groups.
Rosalia: Yeah I think it’s really important to show other perspectives that are not trying to please the Western market or subscribe to its benchmarks of being. Like how you take care of family, or what it means to be queer and how you live that, if you have to be loud and extroverted to be an “empowered” queer person or if perhaps there is a different – equally valid – way. I think from my background in Anthropology, it has always been Western people talking about people from Southeast Asia (or elsewhere). And what I really like with us choosing the films is that we don’t need to meet the demand for storytelling that we are used to, or topics or how to deal with topics. To me it is a valid perspective or an offer already; simply because it comes from a person from the Global South or from the diaspora. For me, in my very complicated positionality of having grown up here, in Germany and still being a part of the diaspora somehow. It feels very good creating that space without me having any kind of authority to define what a good film is. Still, we have us as the curatorial team and we screen some films and we don’t screen others, so we are still kind of gatekeepers. But in having this curatorial function, during this process, there is this lopsided history of who can even present their experiences and their opinions and views to the world. It’s something we always have in the back of our head and then sometimes even if the production quality of the work is not up to a certain standard to get into a film festival, it doesn’t really matter so much. What matters is that the films that we are showing so many are weird in the very best way and I feel like all of them give me something to think about and enlarge the spectrum of how we can be here with one another, with family or society at large or our neighbors. The idea of the “Wandering Salon” taps into this. It is a space where you welcome guests into your house or into your space. These guests can be friends, people you already know who kind of agree with the opinions that you have. But we always have some people who we don’t know before so we have conversations and relations forming from there.
Lisabona: I guess programming always starts from our subjective choices or personal political concerns and the discussion we had as a programming team either challenges or accepts them based on the imagined connection to the audience and of course – technical and logistic issues. I am very grateful that our work allowed me to research and propose films that are censored or politically so marginalized in Indonesia like Aladin and Indonesien Tanzt, as well as to watch archival films from Thailand and Vietnam like Wandering Circus that Phuong or Sarnt suggested for programming. If a film is censored or so politically marginalized, it’s like they’re erased from the collective memory because they are neither properly preserved nor shown for public in Southeast Asia. Working with them can have serious challenge and even dangerous circumstances. This kind of research into archival films is a privilege that we have outside of Southeast Asia and I see this opportunity in Wandering Salon as a stepping stone towards imagining how to confront censorship and marginalization together as a community with overlapping aspiration towards freedom. It’s like we have a second chance of seeing and showing these films again and offering them to the emerging generations.
Phuong: I enjoyed the fact that during the prep for this festival, we were constantly in conversation when we voted together for the films we wanted to bring on. And we did watch a lot! It was a kind of a visual and sound journey that brings you from one place to another, crossing time periods, regimes of values, and confronting you with issues you might have not thought of. For example, in the short film “Water Spinach Garlic Chillies Coca” by Do Van Hoang, he reflects his own trauma and also his relationship with his mother during the time when they both lived as migrants in Hong Kong. When we talk about diaspora, we somehow mostly associate with Asians in the USA or in Europe, a constant cultural and political confrontation between the East and the West. But we rarely think about those Southeast Asians migrating to an Asian country which means the West to them.
As Rosalia said earlier, we were free from the market demand and could suggest films which we personally find interesting or relevant. This is a privilege that we had and for me, it is the nicest thing about doing something together with your friends, friends of friends, joining a journey together and sharing ideas and opinions. The other thing is also that I found it challenging and appealing at the same time to argue with all of you about films which I personally found relevant and wanted to include in the festival. At that time, I was in Hanoi for my ethnographic field work and I was kind of affected by discussions and concerns of the people in Vietnam which deal with lands, urbanization and modernization in a socialist country that is rapidly turning more and more neoliberal and where certain values are collapsing. I remember once, I suggested the film Pomelo Street by the female filmmaker Tran Phuong Thao which was about class and gender struggles on so many levels or How to Live by Tran Van Thuy, a film which was forbidden for many years in Vietnam. At the end, both were voted out by all of you. I have to admit that it hurts a bit that we cannot include both films in the festival. Then, I realized that although we share the same idea and aspiration, or many times, we all decide for the same films, still, we do part from one another in many ways. It’s not a critic, it just reflects perfectly well our diverse backgrounds, values and interests – which is a good thing. It also reflects conflicts, and the diversity of socio-political issues of the region which we – and we make it so easy by collectively calling it Southeast Asia, uniting a region which is not a unity after all. I think the biggest challenge in organizing a festival like this is how to balance these issues and having a long-term dialogue together, also after the festival.
Sarnt: I think to me, the fun in this planning is that we also have expanded into archive films, that we merged into conversation with new films, so we got something from the 1950s, something from the 1980s and 1990s towards last year packed together in one program. Basically we can choose works across time and space. In some of the film festivals that I work for they are kind of strictly intuitional you know. They are very strict about time and year that the films can be from. The Hamburg Film Festival for example, the biggest one I work for, they only accept films from the year before. That’s all the movies will be shown. So they stick to their premiere status apart from other things. It’s almost mixing what Nam said earlier like even memories or generations of people together in Southeast Asia, old films possibly unknown to the younger generation today, so they have the chance to come to our program and the new films are sometimes made by local filmmakers who are friends. So they are craving more, you know. So it’s a bit of people coming together across space, time and generations, which I find very interesting.
We also have some political entities in our group. We have Banying which is a shelter home for women. They have been consulting people on domestic violence and racism discrimination and they will host a movie night. The movie Where We Belong (Kongdej Jaturanrasamee) from Thailand. And then we invite other curators and organizers such as Mon Sisu Satrawaha, who will organize a political film screening in a cafe, and Luu Bich Ngoc who is a friend of Nam and community organizer for documenta fifteen, who will also do a similar gathering.
Phuong: Yes, as I said earlier, it is an opportunity for us to work with friends and friends of friends or with people who were first strangers. It is about opening up some discussions but also about creating a place for us and for others to just gather and who knows where the journey would take place next with all the people we have gathered so far.
Sarnt: I can’t wait to host and interact with the audiences and communities in this upcoming edition. For anyone who would love to come visit Berlin, feel free to come between those dates.
Hai Nam Nguyen is an independent curator and researcher on contemporary Vietnamese arts and photography, oral histories. He worked on the oral history archive of Vietnamese migrants and contract workers in the former GDR, especially in the city Halle an der Salle.
Gugi Gumilang engages in developing and distributing (mostly documentary) film projects from Southeast Asia.He is currently the Executive Director of In-Docs, the non-profit organization behind Docs by the Sea, Good Pitch Indonesia and VitaminDocs, and Documentary Association of Europe (DAE).
Phuong Phan is an independent art historian and curator with focus on socialism, propaganda and contemporary arts. She is a part of the upcoming “Vietnam In Motion” publication and curates different exhibitions on Vietnamese diaspora.
Lisabona Rahman is a film historian and archivist, who works with international film archives concerning heritage, preservation and knowledge sharing activities related to celluloid. She curated programmes for various film festivals and works on databases of Indonesian film history.
Sarnt Utamachote is a curator and filmmaker, whose works focus on Southeast Asian diasporas in the divided Germany (BRD-GDR) and queer mental health in Berlin. They curate and select films for different festivals and cinemas across Germany.
Rosalia Namsai Engchuan is an artist, filmmaker and anthropologist who is interested in ecology of knowledge, grass-root artist-led activism in Southeast Asia and issues of Thai/Asian diaspora in Germany.
