Dynamic Memory Lab – Opening
»Nước Đức. Vietnamesisch-Deutsche Migrationsgeschichte(n)«
The DML ‘nước Đức’ will open on 20 September 2025 as part of the heimaten festival, accompanied by workshops, panel discussions and artistic interventions.
The Dynamic Memory Lab is a dynamic space for remembrance. A participatory exhibition. A place of lived plurality. As a laboratory dedicated entirely to remembrance, it is dynamic, flexible, open and unfinished. It invites visitors to share, pause, discuss, rethink and reflect. About what memory is and what society can be.
The Dynamic Memory Lab Nước Đức focuses on Vietnamese-German migration history and explores the question of how history is remembered and told – or suppressed and concealed.
The focus is on the memories and experiences of the Vietnamese-German community, which have moved and intersected over several decades between flight and contract work, between North and South Vietnam and East and West Germany, between a history of violence and self-empowerment. Nước Đức gives space to experiences that are rarely considered in context or in relation to one another, even though they are closely interwoven. Together, these experiences form a field of tension in memory culture that encompasses all political and social directions of the Cold War and the post-reunification period – like a compass that reveals ideological breaks as well as biographical interconnections.
Curators Dan Thy Nguyen and Nina Reiprich have brought together contributions from artists and activists belonging to the young generation of Vietnamese-German immigrants, who approach the history of Vietnamese-German migration from multiple perspectives. Through artistic explorations, personal texts and interview sequences, the participants in Nước Đức trace the complex experiences of the Vietnamese-German communities. They reveal contradictions, ruptures and gaps. These experiences are narrated as a mutual frame of reference: as memories of a plural community – and as memories of a plural society. These are not linear narratives, but an interplay of different perspectives. In doing so, Nước Đức asks central questions: Who is heard? Which memories are given space? What remains in the shadows? And how can a shared, multi-perspective history be told?
Curators and artists invite and encourage us to understand the complex history of Vietnamese-German migration as part of our shared German and European history. The DML nước Đức opens up a space for new, multifaceted forms of collective memory and encourages us to question boundaries in discourses on memory and, above all, to strengthen memory as a function of our society.
Das heimaten Netzwerk ist eine Initiative von Haus der Kulturen der Welt im Rahmen von heimaten, gefördert durch Der Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien aufgrund eines Beschlusses des Deutschen Bundestags.
