Interview: Ingen Frygt in Vietnam

Ingen Frygt: Cheeky Money Lucky Mountain, 2009. Installation view.

Tell about how you became Black Frygt H’mong.

Essentially we have always been Black Frygt, so it was a natural development for us to do a Sa Pa meltdown with the Black H'mong girls and be transformed to Black Frygt H'mong.

How was it to work in Sa Pa in North Vietnam, where you developed the project for the exhibition?

We only had a few days to form both our partnership with the tribe-girls and to define the actual project, and so our little company moved around Sa Pa a lot, spending a day at the handicraft market lending a mum’s sewing machine, doing photo shoots in the streets and bars. The girls are already part of a generation that abandons many traditions, like marriage at fourteen, so the whole dressing up and acting out in front of the whole town only seemed to empower their status in a really interesting way. As Europeans visiting Sa Pa on the other hand, it’s very hard to step out of the tourist’s shoes. In recent years Sa Pa has become a major tourist spot - thus both bringing new wealth and modern life to the region, but also quite violently altering the meaning of its people’s tribal identity, and this was fascinating but also a bit disquieting to observe. What can you do when you are in a place where everybody thinks of you as the embodiment of money?

Ingen Frygt: Cheeky Money Luckey Mountain, 2009. Installation view.

What was the difference between working in Sa Pa and Hanoi?

It was much like the difference between the creation and the instalment of an art piece. Sa Pa was the creative process and the attempt to figure out what to do, and eventually getting there, and Hanoi was the practical part. And in Sa Pa we worried a little less about violent death in the traffic.

How was your collaboration with the H’mong women?

It is a difficult question to answer because the collaboration became the piece of art. It was difficult to overcome the age difference between us, but the girls and their obvious lack of interest in art as a concept made it an interesting and somewhat mind blowing experience. Somehow the H’mong women caught on quite easily to the whole concept of changing identities together, the power play within that, basically the performative strategy they understood immediately. But why make art, what is an exhibition, and so forth, that was probably a bit foggy, coming from their background, and maybe the economy of doing a project like this seemed quite suspicious to them.

What is the status of H’mong people in Vietnamese society?

To us, they where so much more four young girls than four H’mong girls.

Ingen Frygt: Cheeky Money Lucky Mountain, 2009. Installation view.

How did you experience the cultural differences between you and your collaborators in Vietnam?

The differences that stood out came from those of age and from the fact, that their possibilities in life were so limited compared to ours. The cultural differences didn’t feel bigger than differences between us and any twenty year olds from Denmark. Even if they had an appointment with the Shaman later.

The H’mong women that you collaborated with were technically not artists. Was that a problem or an advantage?

For us as artists it will turn out to be an advantage in our future work, but in the process it was quite difficult to have such a limited amount of time to try to understand each other. Furthermore, it was expected of us to create an exhibition on equal terms - that was the whole purpose of the project, as defined by you. But two-thirds into the collaboration it dawned upon us, that they didn’t actually know the word exhibition. So the obstacles we had to overcome had much more to do with the natural hierarchies between ages, and us being more educated and therefore being more articulate and determined.

Tell about the actual results of the collaboration, what it was, how it looked, and what it was about?

The physical exhibition ended up as a series of tableaus recording the fictional tribes activities and living together, basic stuff – sleeping, eating, chanting, doing gossip-magic. It’s all very aesthetical because our costumes are influenced by the beautiful handicraft of the Sa Pa region, the tribe people’s traditional dress, and all the souvenirs they sell. It’s a very pretty exhibition – but underneath this the power poses of the individuals within the tribe reveal themselves, melt, and distort.

Ingen Frygt: Cheeky Money Lucky Mountain, 2009. Installation view.

Is this project different from your normal way of working, if you have a thing such as a normal way of working?

We usually work in the chaos of trying to understand and question, what is going on in each other’s minds, and how to process this in to some kind of answer and information, which can be useful. As such, it was just a question of deciphering more minds.

What does Cheeky Money Lucky Mountain mean?

It is both meaningful and nonsensical. Our experiences in Sa Pa made us realise, how difficult it is to be perceived as anything else than what you represent. And what do you represent? You represent a culture and a monetary system, which is an export good, and you are the salesman. And when you show up in a small mountain village, which has lost it's virginity to capitalism, you feel like a customer in a brothel. A brothel called cheeky money lucky mountain. The H’mong girls we think agreed. They actually suggested at one point we should call the exhibition something like Stupid tourist trying to look sexy ….

Tell about your contributions to the Bao Luc – Violence exhibition as well.

During our stay in Hanoi, we participated in further two exhibitions, both linked to the official Danish state visit in Vietnam. In the for Vietnam extraordinary debating group exhibition Bao Luc at HFA, curated by Vu Thi Trang, we presented two new videos: A recording of a ritual, in which the tribe – Ingen Frygt and the four H’Mong girls – loudly sob and burn money. It’s a depressed, yet comical piece that questions how exchange between cultures sometimes seem to, a little to easily, boil down to trade and money - what are the objectives of the different tribe members? Do we all just have the financing of our lives in common? A second video shows Ingen Frygt naked, dressed only in their long hair, pointlessly and repeatedly running up stairs of bourgeoisie hierachy. Speaking of naked, Ingen Frygt’s work is sometimes referred to as provocative. We neither agree or disagree with this, as work is perceived differently – however, being provocative on purpose is extremely un-interesting to us. Vietnam is a very different society and our H’Mong partners life circumstances were incomparable to ours. Beforehand when the embassy, after seeing our work, stretched the importance that our collaboration mustn’t have negative impact on the girls reputation, we of course agreed to the responsibility.

In this light, rumours reaching us that we were expected to make trouble at ‘Emergency Room Hanoi’, the curator joking nervously that we weren’t allowed to do a naked performance in front of the danish queen, left us a bit tired. We had unironically accepted the interlace between culture and trade by accepting the invitation from ‘Emergency Room Hanoi’, a flagship in the cultural programme of the danish state visit.

The slightly contradictionary concept of ’Emergency Room’ – boiled down, free artistic expression following a set of conceptional rules – was in Hanoi topped by a second layer of rules, the censorship from a vietnamese censor comité. Adding a third layer – fear of offending the Royals – and thus turning artists into clowns and extras – we could no longer stretch ourselves to see ‘Emergency Room’ as a genuine art project. Our contribute to ‘Emergency Room’ was a vietnamese funeral bouquet, traditionally in the shape of a shield, with a ribbon, hand embroidered with: ’Emergency Room R.I.P. 2009’. However, arriving at the Hanoi Academy of Art, the host of ‘Emergency Room Hanoi’, we rambled into an unexpected fourth layer: The taboo of death. The bouquet was perceived as an omen. Shouting guards and terrified art teachers deteminedly threw us out, and thus we found ourselves standing on the pavement in front of the premises, where we arranged our own Emergency Room, leaning the piece up against a tree. And thus we unpurposedly lived up to the expectations, and the ambassador, the Art Council and the curator all came by to our little opening.

Thanks.

Ingen Frygt: Cheeky Money Lucky Mountain, 2009. Installation view.