Engaged with Daily Life.

When we employ art, media and social dynamics to re-evaluate our relationships to elusive cultural and institutional patterns we start to connect.

I moved beyond traditional studio art (art made in seclusion) out of a deep disillusionment and deflation. A few years ago I got involved in a book publication as a photographer and soon realized how limiting the conventional distribution system can be. As an active content and culture provider I found myself confronted by shortsighted greed that deteriorates relationships. It was a very isolated place where production and consumption are strictly separated and the flow of creative energy drains.

Son LeNgoc explains the single-use camera to Mrs. Tran Thi Thuan, participant of the Shadow Followers project

In direct response I began to work outside of established art and publication spaces, concentrating on the interactions in my daily life and merging production and outcome into the same process. I wanted my work to affect the world to a modest degree, to touch people's lives directly and possibly contribute to a healthier, more functional social sphere. I started to fully embrace the public spheres and disinterested encounter because they bring about the surprise, the immediate connection, even the momentary failure as something very alive and beautiful.

In a time of inequities there is a great need to dedicate resources for envisioning and living new kinds of social relations. Here I want to help create unlikely encounters that allow for the unexpected openings. It is the small interventions at key joints of our social fabric that can affect the larger organism and trigger intriguing feedback loops. Most of all it is about re-establishing truer connections, to ourselves, to other and the world around us.

Truer connections are, for example, when you haggle on the market for the price of a good you get involved, with the vendor, with the goods or service, with the moment (warm exchange). When you shop at the supermarket you chose, pay and don't care anymore (cold exchange) These careless, disengaged transactions are at the root of most of our urgent problems leaving to limitless consumption, greed and depletion of our life base.

_
Each moment of the everyday, every action of living, poses the question: how it might be lived differently, more truthfully and respectfully. Through conscious interventions Momentarium provides a forum of inquiry on human coexistence.

• UP+COMING
• EXPERIMENTS
• DIALOG IN COMMON
• RESEARCH
• SOCIAL PRACTICE
• ABOUT MOMENTARIUM
• CONTACT

Momentarium is an ever-growing archive and with time all of the following links will be populated:

Glossary

Resources

Reading