Sounds of bartering in accented German. A phone conversation in Vietnamese. Delivery trucks honking. Tram stopping. Kids crying. Cashier machines beeping. Bluetooth Music. Silence. ZOOM01_DXC_BER.MP3 is a site-specific sound project based on field recordings of urban ambience at the Dong Xuan Center in Lichtenberg, Berlin – the largest Vietnamese-run market in Germany that is based on Dong Xuan Center in Hanoi, Vietnam.
Sound recordings pick up atmospheres of the various hangars that make up the markets, identify products and services offered in the shops, and trace snippets of conversations between store owners, customers, and tourists. Through interlaced recordings which layer into one composition different aspects of the market life, this soundscape presents the market as a place of both economic and social exchange within the larger narratives of migratory routes and global economies.
This soundscape was created and performed live at an artist residency with Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik (Berlin, July 2023), followed by a live performance at Manzi Art Space (Hanoi, August 2023). From these soundscape performances, a radio broadcast is created.
Composition and realisation: Maya Nguyen
Maya Nguyen is a Vietnamese-Russian interdisciplinary artist with a focus on critical sound performance and diasporic making. She gathers speech fragments, urban recordings, body movements, sounds imitating nature sounds, and videos of daily encounters into open-ended works. These often take the shape of performance lectures, sound installations, movement works, and videos. She works through ambiguity and interaction across borders: making a commitment of not committing to just one side, but to a multiplicity of sides; to the mix of different sound channels; to the touch of different bodies. Through these material interactions, she exposes power relations inherent in human interaction and the environments that facilitate these interactions, focusing on the domestic sphere, colonial histories, migratory routes, and the relating between the human and the natural world. She holds a B.A. in Philosophy and Comparative Literature from the University of Chicago and an M.F.A in Sound from School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
