How the work started was me asking my dad about where he first came to Australia and he's like I came to Sydney, this place and I did a little bit of research and I realised that the East Hills Migrant Hostel was actually a significant indigenous site prior to it being a migrant centre.
My name's James Nguyen. I'm a visual artist who's from Sydney but based in Melbourne. I generally work collaboratively with my family and friends and generally they turn out to be videos and performances.
For The National, there's three screens. The left screen is my dad addressing the camera directly talking about his arrival in Australia and the historic context of the work. The middle screen is my friend Kezia who's the composer for this piece and myself playing with polystyrene which we found while we were on site and the third screen which to the right is my mother reciting a poem that she wrote about the experience of my dad and also about the indigenous history of the site where my dad landed in Australia as a refugee from Vietnam.
I started learning about the deeper histories of the site prior to I guess migrant occupation of the area. Yeah and so, the conversations that I started to have around this with my father and with my family was not just limited to the idea of immigration and arrival but also thinking about what existed before that. The histories that an immigrant might have to contend with when they arrive in Australia.
Initially it was a little bit of a difficult conversation because I guess my family like a lot of other Vietnamese refugees and immigrants haven't really considered what was here before our arrival because when we arrived generally we are promised this kind of land of milk and honey and a land of opportunity which is Hotel Aresa or a new form of I guess terra nullius I guess.
Straightaway my mum was like oh, I can totally contribute to this and maybe write you a poem about this experience and strangely I had never noticed or even acknowledged that maybe my mum could be a creative person in her own right and so, the process of proposing this question or this issue with them I actually learned about their own creative output and also their creative capacity which is a shame because for me I always thought that I would not underestimate or undervalue my own parents but because of how it is and because of how my mum doesn't speak very good English, I pretty much picked up the same sense of judgement that the broader society has of her.
I like being in the space and kind of utilising whatever materials are around to kind of initiate performances and engagement with my family and the people I'm with. I guess it's a good way to start a conversation and think about the resources that are available rather than bringing something from outside with a preconceived idea of how you might occupy that space.
For the work when we actually came there as a family to really experience the site, we actually discovered that it was pretty trashed. I guess a lot of people use that space to go fishing but they left a lot of their trash behind and the trash that was most prevalent was the polystyrene.
The other thing that we noticed while at that site that it was full of weeds, so it was full of asparagus weed and so, for me those two things became quite important in this that consideration of the work.
Working with my friend Kezia who's this amazing composer, we decided to think about how these pieces of polystyrene could be activated and so, while we were there, we started to drop them, rub them together, flick them, shake them, do all these things to generate sound and polystyrene is not the most musical, it's not the most ideal of materials. It's actually quite awful to listen to. It's got a very terrible sound and I guess conceptually Australia's history is something that's just as uncomfortable as rubbing two pieces of polystyrene together. For me conceptually this piece of rubbish actually had a lot of meaning in how myself and my friend and my family have to work through this notion of occupation and settlement.