| dc.description.abstract | Nick Ut’s famous photograph, The Napalm Girl, has shaped the Western world’s collective memory of the Vietnamese-American War. When we only see war, violence and pain through widely distributed photographs, such as The Napalm Girl, our understanding of the pain of others become generic and limited. What such generic images fail to capture is the bodily experience of war that only individuals can give us access to. In this thesis, I will explore a performance piece created by the Vietnamese-French artist Ea Sola. By reading Ea Sola’s artistic praxis as the work of a Vietnamese refugee, themes such as loss, longing, nostalgia and archives emerge as important themes. Taking Ea Sola’s oeuvre as my starting point, I critically examine how particular memories of war become prevailing historical truths and Ea Sola’s attempt to challenge these. The main question that I seek to address is: How does Ea Sola’s work provide us with new perspectives regarding pain, loss and longing by establishing the body as a living archive? To answer this question, I draw on Svetlana Boym’s notion of restorative and reflective nostalgia, and Rebecca Schneider’s porous approach to time in performance art. Furthermore, Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of the traditional archive becomes my entrance into what Ea Sola names the archive-body. Through a close reading of the performing bodies in Drought and Rain (1995) and Trinh T. Minh-ha’s conception of the archive, I understand the archive-body as a network of knowledge, stories and memories transmitted from body to body, and between generations. | eng |