From the archive
28 Oct 2026
On 16 June 2026 France's Court of Cassation chose not to rule alone on Trần Tố Nga's case. It cited the questions the case raises for international law and asked for it to be decided by its Plenary Assembly. That stage is expected early in 2027. Trần is 84, a journalist and war veteran who holds French and Vietnamese citizenship. She was sprayed directly during the war, and her first child died at 17 months. Since 2014 she has been taking the manufacturers of Agent Orange to court in Paris.
Her case is one strand of the research Kim Đoan Quốc is setting out in a three-part series for Makery. Kim is a visual artist who works across installation, video and performance. In 2025 they spent six months in Việt Nam preparing Foliating Memories, a project about Agent Orange pollution. Kim was the 2025 recipient of the Rewilding Cultures Mobility Conversation grant for the project. The grant aims to make artists' movement sustainable and inclusive, and it weighs each recipient's own situation.
Kim's account rests on one technical point. Dioxin, they explain, is a by-product that forms when 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T are mixed at the wrong temperature. Stripping the forest did not require it. By Kim's account, the 14 companies supplying the US army left the temperature uncontrolled and knew what that produced. Employees fell seriously ill and some died. A warning went up through the administration to the US government, and production carried on unchanged. Some 80 million litres were sprayed over the forests of the south.
Two photographs mark the trip. In one, from July 2025, Phùng Tửu Bôi is presenting his archives. In the other, the anthropologist and geographer Marvin Freyne stands in Mã Đà forest in November 2025. Kim writes that they met Freyne against this background.
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