Trinh T. Minh-Ha's "Speaking Nearby"

I find Trinh T. Minh-Ha’s concept of “speaking nearby” instead of “speaking for” helpful in thinking about the desire or willfulness to address a place that is not one’s origin. Rather, this desire reveals one’s own position towards the subject one is speaking about, an allyship that is described and problematized by Saidiya Hartman’s interview with Fred Wilderson in “The Position of the Unthought”. Paralleling actions in LA and Bangkok, Kim Zumpfe’s proposal seeks to reveal the difficulty of such allyship when one action can be perceived as non-compliant and threatening to a site and not, in another. “Speaking nearby” can also be the voice of the lover, recounting memories of a place to one another, as in the tone of Rachel Yezbick’s proposed correspondence between two artists. Abstracted into language, the chosen sites in their respective cities are liberated from the otherwise heavily mediatized representation in cinema.

With technological and digital means of communication, the “nearby” is no longer a question of spatial proximity. It may refer to an intimacy that exceeds physical and temporal boundaries. Whose voice are we hearing in the duet of Ana Teo Ala-Ruona’s avatar, a speaker with their pre-recorded voice and the live voice of the Bangkok-based performer’s, performing in real time?
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Linda Franke’s proposal pursues this multivocality (another Trinh T. Minh-Ha’s term) by asking for photograph submissions of useful and disused objects that would later be printed on T shirts for participants to wear. The census nature of the project draws a portrait of Bangkok’s economy through every day objects and their relationships to their users. Lastly, Suneil Sanzgiri’s undertaking of Indian diasporic identity at Wat Khaek by way of recording the temple with a LomoKino creates a double distanciation between the performer, the camera and the temple itself. The LomoKino only records images by being manually cranked. The images produced are therefore traces of the rhythms of the performer’s body instead of documentation of the temple as site.

Excerpts from "Speaking Nearby": A Conversation with Trinh T. Minh-Ha, Nancy N. Chen,
​in Visual Anthropology Review, Volume 8 Number 1, Spring 1992