Visualizing Animal Trauma and Empty Forest Syndrome in the Moving Imagery of Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn

Abstract

Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn’s My Ailing Beliefs Can Cure Your Wretched Desires (2017) suggests that human-nonhuman relations are at an impasse. In this double-screen video installation, two animal spirits of subspecies that have recently gone extinct in Vietnam—the Javan rhino and a type of giant turtle—debate the possibility of animal liberation from humankind. Vietnam is a country with one of the most complex natural ecosystems on the planet, but it has suffered devastating histories of ecocide and animal extinctions through long histories of colonial and neocolonial violence. What does it mean to grapple with the posttraumatic time of extinction, or the aftereffects of the apparently complete annihilation of a whole species? Nguyễn’s video installation employs what I term an IPTSD aesthetic, or an aesthetic of interspecies and intergenerational posttraumatic stress disorder, representing long-term and collective trauma for animals. The video installation sweeps viewers up in an emotional rollercoaster—with its dizzying camerawork, affectively charged material, and dark, beating soundtrack—only to come to an apparent standstill in the debate for animal emancipation. Ultimately, how could we liberate animals from human violence? What could break the cycle? Mr. Rhino’s Communist rhetoric and Madame Turtle’ pacifist, Buddhist beliefs seem irreconcilable, yet the artwork interweaves a third perspective, drawing on Indigenous animist cosmologies in Vietnam to suggest the need for reimagined, interdependent human-nonhuman relations based on radical care, where people would recognize animal subjectivities and work toward interspecies empathy and long-term protection, toward stewardship of and solidarity with the Earth.