Nguyễn Trinh Thi works with film, yet she always questions and resists the structures imposed by the medium in the image and the camera. As our globalized and westernized cultures have come to be visually dominated, she feels the need to look for a more sensitive approach to perceiving the world by paying more attention to aural landscapes. That was how she became interested in working with sound to focus on listening. For her most recent works – And They Die a Natural Death (2022), presented at documenta 15, and Ri s̄eīyng’ [Sound-Less] (2023), presented at the 3rd Thailand Biennale – she created an environment open toward the invisible, allowing unpredictable forces, human and non-human alike, to enter, make sound, and – listen. In Ri s̄eīyng’, this structure transpired into a series of automated instruments, activated by signals coded from the Mekong River’s water flow. As dictated by live data, the sounds created by the instruments fluctuated, requiring audiences to be fully present in order to experience the work.

Within sounds, you can see a plurality of back-and-forth between human and non-human. For the 36th Bienal de São Paulo, she returned to the instruments’ functional structure and sound-making potential, transcending cultural boundaries, by incorporating a vast array of automated instruments – some from Vietnam, others locally sourced. The soundscape, composed by Nguyễn with influences of music from East Asia, is ever-changing, constantly being randomized, interrupted, or silenced in interactions with movements and the human voice in the space, as well as with levels of sunlight in the room which is itself constructed to be an over-sized camera obscura. When detecting a movement or human voice, for example, the instruments will stop playing, resulting in silence until stillness is restored, like in the woods, where the soundscape of birds, animals, and spirits only unfolds fully when you are calmly listening.