A Tongue Has Been Scraped
 2024
single channel video installation, 00:03:03 min
stone, mechanical piping, steel, scratchboard, guitar string, bass key tuning peg,
U.S. harvested bamboo.
please contact for full body of work


When the barrel of this gun was assembled,
a line of drums awaited its arrival.
To communicate across stretches of land,
of men, meant anticipating the drum first.    

Sound warfare had begun as a method of dance.
Marching bands dictating how one's
motor functions would sync up to the next.
Military manuals were musical notations.   

 
           Prior to organized communication via satellite or radio waves, a country’s army dedicated the function of music to serve as interlocutors between soldiers and their higher ranks on the field. These troops scored the manuals for early celebrations of destruction, and for that, they were absolved of the battlefield and elevated to the status of witness. In the film, A Tongue Has Been Scraped, my mother sings a prayer while we watch the procession of a Đàn Bầu: a monochord zither controlled by tension which replicate the tones present in Vietnamese. The instrument is posed as a light antitank weapon, or L.A.W., to engage sound with the likes of a trigger on a gun. I seek to conjure an artillery orchestra to rebuke the historical and present defacing of a people, as well as reveal the ensemble’s ability to restructure the brain and re/generate memory.