Nguyễn + Transitory x Audrey Chen // Palais Populaire // 17 SEP 2025, Berlin

Описание: The Moonlight Sends My Lovesickness Across a Thousand Miles by Nguyễn + Transitory with Audrey Chen is a live sound intervention that traces one of the narrative threads in Charmaine Poh’s video installation The Moon is Wet. The work listens to the sonic residue of a dislocated past - where listening becomes a method of collective reconstitution, and sound emerges as an ephemeral site of transmission.

Nguyễn + Transitory have been researching the sonic environments that might have accompanied migrant workers arriving in Singapore across different historical periods. Rather than reconstructing a verifiable archive, they approach this as a speculative gesture: cross-referencing migration timelines with the release of popular songs to imagine what could have been heard, carried, and remembered across oceans. One such song - Wu Yingyin’s The Moonlight Sends My Lovesickness Across a Thousand Miles - provides both title and anchor to the performance. Its lyrics evoke love and longing stretched across distance: a solitary singer addressing the moon as confidant and messenger, pleading for a sign to ease her separation.

Charmaine Poh’s The Moon is Wet forms the visual and narrative ground for this intervention. An intricately layered meditation on myth, labor history, and contemporary voices, the installation frames migration - and particularly the migrant women who sustained Singaporean households for decades - within ecological and urban transformations. It surfaces the often-silenced queer partnerships and intimate kinships that emerged among these women, offering glimpses of alternative modes of care and solidarity beyond heteronormative family structures. In doing so, the work honors suppressed cultural memories and female lineages, resonating with mourning, resilience, and subtle resistance.

Nguyễn + Transitory’s practice unfolds through visceral performances and sculptural, sound-rooted works that embody collectivity, intimacy, and modes of relationality that resist fixed forms. In The Moonlight Sends My Lovesickness Across a Thousand Miles, they extend this approach by weaving popular songs of the past with threads of Poh’s video installation, their own electronics, and Audrey Chen’s live vocalisations. Chen’s voice, long attuned to themes of displacement and ancestral memory, becomes material for transformation - cut up and reconfigured in real time through the use of period Nagra tape machines, which function both as playback devices and as instruments in their own right. In collapsing past and present, reworking sonic memory into volatile, intimate textures, Nguyễn + Transitory craft a sonic landscape that resonates with Chen’s embodied voice while carrying forward their wider practice of queering technologies, invoking matriarchal imaginaries, and forging speculative kinships across Asia and its diasporas. The performance unfolds as an echo of The Moon is Wet - a live intervention that reopens its narratives through sound, reminding us that what has been silenced or dislocated can still be heard, reconfigured, and carried into the present.