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Courtesy of Paul Bonnell.
In the present collection, I question how documents have separated and (dis)located me from where I was born, even as they have empowered and privileged me, particularly in the context of March and April, 1975. (I left Vietnam with my adoptive mother in March, 1975, just days ahead of the Battle of Ban Me Thuot and, subsequently, the end of the war.) In many ways, it was documents that “secured” my departure, and it is also in documents that I find and lose details and fragments of birth family and birth country. These are both knowns and unknowns, discoveries and erasures.
In this piece, I work with distorted and truncated and magnified images of documents–passport pages, visas, maps, a stamp on a legal note, and immunization records–as well as slide photographs, taken by my adoptive mother: the Unisphere at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York, a flowering tree at the border of Stiêng territory in Vietnam, and one taken from the shore at the Happy Haven Leprosarium. In an attempt to work with analog tools, such as my adoptive mother used, I typed the image poem on a 1940 manual Royal Companion typewriter. I also work with film photography.
This is part of an ongoing project/presentation, “Between Tower and Sea.” I also explore these origin stories in an essay published on diaCRITICS and in my blog, https://bonnersbonn.wordpress.com. (Do you want me to include a QR code here for my blog?)
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Paul Bonnell was born in Buôn Ma Thuột, Vietnam. He has lived in the Philippines, Malaysia, and North Carolina, and now lives in Idaho with his family. He has interests in poetry, music, essays, fiction, hybrid art, the Vietnamese Diaspora, the Chăm, the Bru, the Rhadé/Êđê, mountain culture, climbing, biopolitics, and transracial/transnational adoption.
Paul has been working on and presenting a project, “Between Tower and Sea,” which incorporates slide and digital photography, film, live music, spoken word, documents, maps, and readings. The project draws on his late mother’s extensive collection of slide and print photographs, taken during her years in Vietnam. It explores themes of intersection and fragmentation—origin myths, disease, dislocation, the de-canon, glaciers, rivers, and imagination.