Understanding Incompleteness
17
gallery
2017-11-19T18:56:12-08:00
Check the annotations to see how the exhibition focuses on American soldiers and presidential election and leaves out information related to Vietnam soldiers, normal people, and other countries.
Contrary to the archive that I visited, in my archive, I choose to reclaim the “silences” by showing what is not said in the exhibition such as what happened before the U.S. participated in the war, what the conditions of other relative countries were during that time, and how the war had influenced normal people rather than only powerful figures, all of which people do not have the chance to learn about by simply looking at the exhibition.
I also understand that there will be inevitable limits in my archive since history is always told from an embodied standpoint that shows a particular perspective from the historians, and any archive can never reach totality. By examining the “database of dreams”, Rebecca Lemov reminds us that there is inevitable partiality of the materials used every archive. Thus, the media archive that I make for representing the “silences” of the Vietnam War is never a total archive since it’s made based on my own perspective of choosing materials.
