‘Museum of the Immigrating Garden’ , Project No5

In Galerie Nord, Berlin, Germany

Tuan Mami’s environmental installation, Museum of the Immigrating Garden, evokes deeply personal and unarticulated histories of migration from Vietnam to Germany. This work stems from the artist’s ongoing environmental artwork, Vietnamese Immigrating Garden (2020 - present). This project traces discretely imported plants for personal use by Vietnamese labour migrants to countries such as Germany and Taiwan from the 1960s to the present.  Vietnamese Immigrating Garden invites Vietnamese communities to lend their personal plants to a collectively accessible, living ‘garden’. Here, the nomenclature of each plant and its individual story of origin are not in the forefront. Rather, Vietnamese Immigrating Garden reflects a hidden collective voice.  

For Galerie Nord, the artist has transformed  Vietnamese Immigrating Garden into a museum-like environment. The displayed plants and seeds are gathered mainly from communities in Berlin. Displayed alongside anonymous and blurred audio-recordings, they represent an archive of multi-layered voices. Firstly, the historical voice: the plants ‘speak’ to the two-way importation of plants between Europe and Asia during colonial times which have rendered the precise origin of many specimens impossible to identify. Secondly, the voice of recent history: they embody familial stories and recollections of Vietnamese communities in Germany. And lastly, voices from the present moment: background conversations through which networks of friendship and trust were formed to give birth to the Vietnamese Immigrating Garden.  

@photo by Michael Zeeh,weitere Bilder, Tuan Mami