mưa chéo chiều | rain sideways - I write (in Vietnamese): a poetry night welcomes the return of poetic voices featured in the exhibition and publication I write (in Vietnamese) | I write (in Vietnamese) at Goethe-Institut Hanoi, Spring 2021. An invitation becomes an engagement: the poets and artists from the exhibition have continued to accompany each other, to meet again and meet new writers, new readers in workshops and collaborative projects. Throughout 2021 and until the beginning of 2022, a year of prolonged epidemic, the authors have sustained the work by writing - recording - filming, together reading new poems, discussing literary issues through the zoom screen in a form of home-based creative residence.

As a result, mưa chéo chiều: một chiếu thơ zoom không phân cảnh | rain sideways: one scene poetry zoom- theatre was born, a collective play-poem, exhibiting between Vietnamese and English, and being lived in another language: a moving image poem - with video footage and voices of the authors themselves. With mixed and overlapped frames of time and space, of voices, of different landscapes and memories, mưa chéo chiều | rain sideways performs the differences and distances that are erased and brought together in the effort of writing and translating between verbal and non-verbal languages.

mưa chéo chiều | rain sideways - I write (in Vietnamese): a poetry night will begin by showing the video poem, followed by readings and discussions by the Vietnamese authors and artists, who are geographically not yet fixed but have become more and more familiar with the readers of Vietnamese poetry. 

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Thu Uyên (1996) graduated from Kalamazoo College with a Critical Ethnic Studies major. She's currently curating a Vietnamese folio for PANK Magazine, and trying to write: precioussummer.wordpress.com

Linh San (1998) earned a bachelor's degree in Literature from Hanoi National University of Education and currently works in several art spaces in Hanoi.  Linh San's works span a wide range of materials, including poetry, moving images, and ceramics. Her works depict the poetic, plain, and contemplative moments of daily life. 

Huong Tra (@nopoemforclaudia) tiptoeing around writing, around writing nothing, around facing life seriously; a firm stand: yes to cigarettes.

Nguyễn Hoàng Quyên (1993) is a writer and curator living in Vietnam. Her texts have appeared in The Margins, Words Without Borders and various anthologies and exhibition catalogues. Nguyễn-Hoàng holds a B.A. from Stanford University.

Mai Duy Quang (2002, Hanoi). His poems have been published or are forthcoming from The American Poetry Review, The Lifted Brow, Overland and others. He is the author of the chapbooks ‘Homeward’ and 'Journals to' (Story Factory, 2018-19).

Kai Ng young visual artist based in Saigon. Working with different mediums, including texts, images and moving images. His practices focus on the discovery and re-discovery of his selves.

Chu Lan Anh (1995) is learning adjectives.

Nguyễn Lâm Thảo Thi (1995) is loitering in the archives.

Nguyễn Quang Kiếm works as an independent art and cultural coordinator and organiser. He currently manages XplusX Studio, a theatre arts and set design company, and Union Hub, a platform to discover the interconnection between youth, contemporary arts and social sciences. In 2021, he managed the production of Antigone- m Mù, in which he included the notion of immersive play inside a social media application named Discord. As an art & cultural organiser, his main focus is to create a creative and compassionate environment for Vietnamese youth through artistic programs, and hoping to explore different issues surrounding coming-of-age experience during the process.

Thùy Dương from human-decor to human-practice. 

Nhã Thuyên (1986) works as a writer and editor in Hà Nội. Her most recent books are bất\ \tuẫn: những hiện diện [tự-] vắng trong thơ Việt and its English edition: un\ \martyred: [self-]vanishing presences in Vietnamese poetry (Roofbook, USA, 2019) and moon fevers (Tilted Axis Press, UK, 2019). Her main practices are writing between languages, experimenting with translations, and poetic exchanges. With Kaitlin Rees, she founded AJAR in 2014, a micro bilingual literary journal-press, a precariously online, printed space for poetic exchange. She otherwise talks to walls and soliloquies nonsense when having no other emergencies of life to deal with. Her next book of poetry vị nước (taste of waters) is waiting to see the moon.