Trinh T. Minh-ha, Visiting Artist Lecture 1996

Filmmaker, composer, writer, and interdisciplinary artist Trinh T. Minh-ha gives a lecture at Skowhegan talking about her artistic practice. Minh-ha speaks about the importance of being invited to a place aligned with nature that offers her a trajectory which takes into its movement the question widely raised in our times about the migrant self, boundaries, and multiplicity. For Minh-ha, the migrant self moves physically and is a self that embarks on a practice having to negotiate between home and abroad, native culture and adopted culture, between a here, a there, and an elsewhere. Minh-ha speaks about her practice always being itself and more then itself, reflecting on how there is also always more to reality then what we are able to see, hear, or touch. Minh-ha believes that reality does not stop at our limits, and the boundaries we set up between what is real, what is natural, and what is supernatural speaks of and to our limits. Minh-ha then states that what is cinematic, poetic, and political thrives at the boundaries of cinema, poetry, and politics. Whether it’s the writing of a book or the making of a film, both creative acts transforms the way the artist sees herself and the world around her. The work is a gift, and whether it is worth passing it on or not depends on whether it succeeds in taking her elsewhere then where she started out. Minh-ha ends her lecture by stating that it is only in the transformative potential of the work that one can hope to make a difference in other peoples ways of seeing and experiencing.