From the archive
30 Oct 2026
Kim Đoan Quốc is a visual artist whose installations, videos and performances keep returning to bodies, plants and the idea of a safe space. In 2025 Kim spent six months in Việt Nam doing research for a project called Foliating Memories, which deals with Agent Orange pollution and spans Việt Nam and France. The Rewilding Cultures Mobility Conversation grant paid for the trip. Kim is now writing about the project for Makery in three parts, of which this account draws on the first.
The history Kim is working with begins in the forest. Operation Ranch Hand put 80 million litres of Agent Orange on the forests of South Việt Nam, to find resistance fighters under the canopy. Kim's sharpest objection is that dioxin, the poison in the mixture, did nothing for the defoliation. It came from a production temperature the manufacturers chose not to control. A note warning of the danger reached the US government, and production carried on unchanged. When Vietnamese victims brought a case between 2004 and 2009, it was dismissed.
Trần Tố Nga is still pursuing the manufacturers. She is 84, a journalist and war veteran with French and Vietnamese nationality, and she was sprayed directly during the war. She lost her first child at 17 months and has since lived through several serious illnesses. Since 2014 she has had a case running in Paris against the companies that made Agent Orange. On 16 June 2026 the Court of Cassation referred it to its Plenary Assembly over its implications for international law. That hearing is expected early in 2027.
Through this work Kim met Marvin Freyne, an anthropologist and geographer, who was in Mã Đà forest in November 2025.
Makery · Read the source