Alvin Luong, Hole Story, video, 2019 - 2023, 17:05 (MM:SS), Video, 3840 x 2160
Hole Story imagines exposed sewer holes in a failed real estate development in Ho Chi Minh City as ciphers to link the city’s tumultuous past, booming contemporary capitalism, and its watery future from climate change. Exposed sewers that resulted from a speculative real estate scam become reinterpreted as remnant guerilla warfare tunnels and also as climate change mitigation structures. The video unfolds through a fictitious real estate agent whose character is inspired from an internet agent who claimed to sell the land that the video is produced on. The land in question is the site of the artist’s family home and also the site of the former Phong Phú commune. The commune produced agitation propaganda against the French rule of Indochina and later trained guerilla fighters against the American occupation of southern Vietnam. Throughout the Vietnam-America War the land had become a battlefield with hundreds of communists perishing on the land and an untold number of Vietnamese fighting for the south. Today, the land is now scarred from an abrupt cessation of construction due to the real estate scam and continuously floods as the region experiences increasingly severe monsoons and rising sea levels. The video is both a portrait of the land as much as it is a glimpse of the near-past and soon-to-come future from the vantage point of present-day Ho Chi Minh City.
Hole Story is narrated in Vietnamese with subtitles available in English and Chinese (Traditional). The music score of Hole Story was produced by Zach Sch, Rắn Cạp Đuôi.
