When you mention puppets to someone in Vietnam, they will immediately think of water puppets. And if not this traditional art form frequently relegated to tourism activities, then they will think of children’s entertainment. But Vietnam is in fact home to a small but devoted group of people involved in contemporary puppetry and object theatre because, as TồLô Puppet Theatre Company puts it, the genre holds “magical, unexpected, and sometimes grotesque possibilities.”
Saigoneer’s three-week jaunt across Vietnam to visit the art residences participating in the GoSEA program taught us a lot about the potential and particulars of providing artists with the time and space to create. Host institutions in the south introduced us to the different atmospheres and ethos that each residency can foster, while stops in the central region revealed different approaches to residency outcomes. Our trip to Hanoi supported these observations while underscoring how residencies can cater to different genres of art and production processes.
Local traditions mingle with international movements at TồLô Puppet Theatre Company
There is no confusion about what art form TồLô Puppet Theatre Company focuses on; it’s right there in the name. The group was founded by two Hanoi natives: Linh Valerie Phạm, who studied experimental puppetry and theatre in the USA, and Trần Kim Ngọc, a performer, juggler, and musician who graduated from The Vietnam Circus School and worked with the Việt Nam Circus Federation for nearly a decade before touring with Làng Tôi (My Village). Given their backgrounds and experience with collaborative performances at festivals and events around the world, it’s of little surprise that the residency hosts artists interested in puppetry and adjacent arts that can be integrated into puppetry, such as music, dance, and film.
The pair had just welcomed their first child when we visited, so one of the group's members, Linh Khánh Nguyễn, showed us around the apartment unit in a modern skyrise that serves as both a rehearsal space and lodging for residency participants. She showed off the stunning langur puppets that a visiting artist from Singapore had crafted during his stay before donning the giant trash puppet that TồLô uses in “Thổ địa,” a performance that tackles environmental issues. When staging the show across the region, they sometimes feature a sound artist, emblematic of contemporary puppetry’s ability to embrace tangential art forms.
Linh later brought us to the workshop across town where the team crafts puppets for their own shows and for outside groups, including a massive rat made for the United Nations International School. The array of woodworking and sewing equipment and heavy-duty lacquer tools also allows them to hold workshops with residency participants. Visiting practitioners can also lead and participate in artist talks, field trips, and studio sharing alongside unstructured discourse. TồLô’s knowledge of traditional Vietnamese puppetry, including water puppets, and their relationships with local artisan communities, is of unique value to international artists.
Interest in puppetry, not experience, however, is what matters. Linh, for example, was trained as a physics teacher with an interest in dance, and merely found puppets intriguing during one of the group’s many community activities that aim to spread the spirit of Phá Rối – playful, daring, and joyfully unruly. “I see this company as a community itself; everybody has come from different backgrounds: The circus, puppetry, physics … But when people come here, we can share those differences but also the similarities between us,” she said. “Together we can create something. It brings a sense of belonging when you can contribute what you have to the project and to this community.”
Accomplished photography accompanied by an ice-cold beer
Linh Phạm in the Matca office with a photo from a past show on the window.
Of all the residencies Saigoneer visited, Matca likely has the strongest name recognition. And even if you don’t know it by name, you have probably seen some photos taken by its co-founder, Linh Phạm, in the New York Times and elsewhere. “When I started photography over a decade ago, I was looking for some sort of channel that I could learn the craft from; I was looking for resources that I could inherit to learn from and grow,” he said of the origins of Matca.
Upon attracting a significant domestic and international following, Matca expanded in 2019 from an online repository of resources to a physical space within sight of Hồ Chí Minh Museum alongside a publishing imprint through which they produce their own books. The photographers, artists, curators, writers, and researchers who attended exhibitions, workshops, and talks expressed interest in more involved opportunities to exchange and learn from the Matca team, leading to the organic establishment of the residency programme.
Upon entering Matca’s office, visitors will immediately notice the bookshelves wrapping around the room. “As photographers, we just love the medium of books,” explains Hà Đào Matca’s managing editor and program coordinator, and esteemed artist who works with photography and moving image. Amongst the more than 700 photobook titles are a significant number focusing on Vietnam and Southeast Asia. Keeping them is a matter of “preserving legacy; for education purposes as well, because some of these can be used in workshops as reference,” Hà explained.
Matca’s residency allows individuals interested in photography as a practice and critical inquiry to engage deeply with the book collection as well as receive guidance in navigating a city that is rich in tradition and inspiration but difficult to understand intimately. Moreover, residency participants can access formal opportunities, including portfolio critique sessions, promotion via online platforms, introductions to local artists, curators, and cultural organisations, and optional public activities such as artist talks, workshops, and exhibitions.
For all the rigor and prestige associated with Matca, the entire team is quite laid-back and fun. “Having a community is just like having another best friend,” Linh said of the atmosphere they aim for. “You can share ideas and bounce back things that you've been thinking about or been very obsessed about.” While noting that the residency has private Airbnb accommodations and plenty of space for solitary reflection, he added that the most impactful moments of the residency often occur on the open-air rooftop, surrounded by plants, sipping ice-cold beer.
The intangible influence of nature, devastation, and development at ba-bau air
“Around 50km from the center of Hanoi … between agricultural life and industrial life, you come here, you are inside the garden,” interdisciplinary artist and curator/producer Linh Thảo Đinh said as a means of introducing ba-baur air’s physical location. That one-and-a-half-hectare permaculture garden (B.E.E Garden) with hundreds of native species planted for study and cultivation contains the residency’s simple structures that serve as living areas and shared spaces to work, research, experiment, eat, and relax. Most spectacular is the multifunctional Mường community house, which embodies the vernacular architecture, oral cosmologies, and material traditions of the ethnic minority group that lives in the area and of which Linh is a member. This unique environment that occupies a space simultaneously curated and at the mercy of outside influences invites research-led, ecology-minded, and cross-disciplinary artists.
In contrast to Matca and TồLô’s focus on specific art forms, ba-bau air embraces practitioners from a wide range of disciplines who can find inspiration in blooming pomelo trees, granite mountains rubbled for building materials, and the slow march of Hanoian lifestyles into a countryside that has been historically home to Mường communities. More important than what kind of art one makes is how they make it at ba-bau air. The spacious, relatively remote location fosters quiet rumination and self-motivated hours to ask context-specific questions and grapple with difficult answers, not work for final products but ongoing understanding and creation.
In addition to comfort with free time to explore materials, engage with local knowledge, and reflect on output, ba-bau air stresses the importance of openness to guidance. As an experienced and active participant in the region’s art world, familiar with the nuances of local cultures and histories, Linh takes an active role in providing residency participants with access, understanding, and research resources to inform their creative inquiries.
While ba-bau air is removed from Hanoi, it's not disconnected. Thanks in part to Linh’s connections with artists, galleries, and institutions in the capital, residency participants can explore the local art scene through organized visits, exchanges, and public programs. Linh hopes such collaboration can lead to an art festival in the near future, and in the meantime, the field trips into the surrounding countryside provide a wealth of insight and experience, particularly for international artists in search of an immersive environment that would otherwise be difficult to integrate into. But most importantly ba-bau air makes room for collaboration and artistic exchange in informal, unscripted moments. “We eat together, we share the same space together, and that's were maybe some magic happen,” Linh says before noting its where “duyên” exists.
This concludes Saigoneer’s three-part focus on artist residences. You can read part one (Saigon and Đà Lạt) here and part two (Huế, Hội An and Đà Nẵng) here.
