Alluvial Ontologies: Reimagining Human-Environment Relations in the Mekong Delta
December 2023

Introduction
The Mekong is a transboundary river which runs through China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam (Kansal et al. 130). It carries nutrient-rich silt from upstream to downstream and across national borders, replenishing and enriching the land as it goes. The majority of sediment carried by the currents ends up in the lower basin where it forms the Mekong Delta: a distributary network that spans a large portion of southwestern Vietnam, eventually emptying into the East Sea (132). Deltas are amphibious landforms or wetlands, “formed as rivers empty their water and sediment into another body of water, such as a lake, an ocean or another river” (“Delta”). The slowing momentum of the river and the “build-up of sediment allows the river to break from its single channel” as it nears its mouth, branching off into distributaries and forming small pockets of land in-between (“Delta”).

Deltas form a mutable boundary between land and sea, composed of unconsolidated sediment these muddy alluvial formations continually shift according to seasonal rhythms and the amount of silt moving downstream. Deltas are watery, unstable and relatively inhospitable environments. Despite these conditions, colonial powers have still sought to manage and consolidate these muddy terrains through irrigation systems and techno-scientific projects such as hydroelectric dams; “imagining the potential of river deltas in terms of the possibility of land reclamation for agriculture” and trade (Morita and Jensen 122). The violence of colonial projects and impending ecological disaster within delta regions is the stimulus behind Thao Nguyen Phan’s 2019 exhibition Becoming Alluvium. The immersive show, consisting of a single-channel 16-minute video work by the same name and a double-sided lacquer and silk piece titled ‘Perpetual Brightness’, continues her artistic preoccupation with the Mekong River and Delta (“Becoming Alluvium - Thao Nguyen Phan”). According to the artist, “in recent decades human intervention along the Mekong has been so violent that it has forever changed the nature of its flow” ( “Becoming Alluvium”). Processes such as damming, riverbed mining and groundwater extraction have lessened the amount of silt reaching the lower basin, putting the Mekong and its inhabitants at risk of rising sea levels and salt-water intrusion due to the erosion of the deltas shorelines (Renaud and Kuenzer 4). Conditions which have been further aggravated by the effects of global warming.

For these reasons, it is increasingly important to reconsider and reimagine the relationship between humans and the environment. In Bodily Natures: Science, Environment and the Material Self, Stacy Alaimo argues that “potent ethical and political possibility emerge from the literal contact zone between human corporeality and more-than-human nature” (2). In this paper, through a close analysis of Phan’s 2019 exhibition Becoming Alluvium, I seek to muddy the water of conventional subject-object epistemology to posit a new relational, alluvial ontology of generative and collective becoming. I do so by exploring the co-emergent “intra-action” between alluvium and the delta, whereby alluvium can be seen as the object and the delta as the subject (Barad 393). I argue that ‘Becoming Alluvium’ enacts an alluvial logic that disturbs the supposedly discrete nature of the human body and posits it within a lively wet ontology. As Alaimo suggests “imagining human corporeality as trans-corporeality, in which humans are always intermeshed with the more-than-human world, underlines the extent to which the substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from ‘the environment’” (2). My argument is situated within the theoretical discourses of new materialism and posthumanism, which aim to create a paradigm shift in the established dichotomy between human and non-human by positing the former in a distributed field of agency.

Terra Firma
Delta regions have received a considerable amount of critical attention in recent years, not only because of their susceptibility to rising sea levels but because they are topographies that trouble a Western notion of “terrestrial ontology” (Krause 404). As Stuart McLean notes in an article titled “Black Goo: Forceful Encounters with Matter in Europe’s Muddy Margins”, even the lexical construction of the term ‘wetland’ suggests the “too unmistakable partiality for terra firms and a concomitant desire to reduce the liquidity and wetness to predicates of the solid substance of dry land” (609). Adding, “what the term wetlands simultaneously references and seeks to contain is precisely the volatility of substance that characterises such land-water admixtures, their existence betwixt and between clearly differentiated states of matter” (609). This theoretical fear of ‘differentiated states of matter’ and the ‘partiality for terra firms’ originates in the Western humanist understanding of embodiment; ‘where bodies are figured as discrete and coherent individual subjects, and as fundamentally autonomous’ (Neimanis 2). As Astrida Neimanis notes, ‘evidence of this dominant paradigm underpins many if not all of our social, political, economic and legal frameworks in the Western world’ (2). Deltas—as saturated, shifting and seeping interstices which refuse to be consolidated by Western ontological binaries—provide useful sites to reconsider the lively more-than-human agency of supposedly inanimate things and to reconceptualise our bodily condition in relation.

Geological Becoming and Subject-Object
The Mekong River and Delta region is the visual focal point of Phan’s video piece ‘Becoming Alluvium’. According to the artist, the film is assembled like a ‘humanistic or animistic memory’ in which experiences are not ‘recalled in chronological order’ but remembered by ‘the association of one thing with another’ (“Becoming Alluvium”). The work entangles historical literary references and myth, such as Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Marguerite Duras’s The Lover, with contemporary film footage of the verdant materiality of the Mekong (“Becoming Alluvium”). While some critics have read Phan’s use of intertextuality as an attempt to reconstruct a collective memory from the ‘nonhistory’ of colonial violence, ‘Becoming Alluvium’ equally incites a messy, geological sense of becoming (Glissant 65).

The non-linear and associative structure of ‘Becoming Alluvium’ produces what Neimanis and Walker have called a sense of ‘thick time’: a ‘transcorporeal stretching between present, future and past that foregrounds non-chronological durationality’ (562). The film is formally divided into three chapters or ‘reincarnations’ which continually loop, disturbing a normative sense of temporality or a humanist idea of linearity. Rather, elements, voices and histories are deposited only to be recycled producing a cyclical or geological conception of history. As Neimanis and Walker note, ‘transcorporeality is…an ontological orientation that expresses the imbrication of human and non-human natures. It denies the myth that human bodies are discrete in time and space’ (563). ‘Becoming Alluvium’ works to place the viewer within the Delta and its long, geological processes of becoming to bring the human into attunement or perhaps even embodiment with the delta environment.

The piece opens with the isolated sound of an ‘outboard motor puttering in the dark. The tea-brown, silt-clouded water of the Mekong’ appears beneath the nose of the small vessel as lines from the ‘great poet Rabindranath Tagore’s The Gardener lap the screen’ (Judah) (see fig.1). In the opening shots the viewer’s eye is drawn along by the trajectory of many different vessels as they trail the expanse of the Mekong. The great body of water fills the screen and appears to always pull in the opposite direction to the industrial shipping containers and tug-boats that feature repeatedly in the first ‘reincarnation’. The struggling, belittled vessels that punctuate the Mekong work to suggest the more-than-human agency of the seemingly calm body of water. At the same time, a voiceover recites extracts from Duras’s autobiographical novel The Lover, which is set in French Indochina, as the young woman ponders the Mekong’s rhythms: ‘it flows quietly, without a sound, like blood in the body’ (Martin). By drawing an association between ‘blood’ and the movement of the river, Phan suggests the viewer might consider the Mekong Delta and the human as one and the same — as a subject.

That said, deltas are not discrete subjects like how we traditionally conceive of humans but are continuously made and unmade by geological and meteorological processes, particularly by the movement of sediment such as silt or alluvium — as the title of Phan’s video piece suggests. Alluvium has a rich conceptual history, most notably featuring in Edouard Glissant’s 1990 book Poetics of Relation, where he uses it as a metaphor to establish the ‘terms of a sedimented, accumulative philosophy of history’ (Baucom 320). In ‘Sedimentary Ways’, Lindsay Bremner defines alluvial deposits as ‘assemblages of earth matter washed over and deposited on topographic surfaces that carry evidence of their origins and transportation history and are valued for their fertility and their regenerative value’. Bremner further adds:

to alleviate is a transitive verb, meaning to cover with or to deposit alluvium. It comes from the Latin noun alluvius, derived from alluere, meaning to wash against and to leave traces of that material exchange behind. Alluviation is an intra-active material exchange between fluids, sediment and soil that redistributes the rubble, silt, clay and organic matter that a river has gathered from multiple elsewhere and other times.

Therefore, we might consider how ‘Becoming Alluvium’ enacts an alluvial logic to ‘wash against’ or graze the viewer to disturb the supposedly discrete nature of the human body and resituate it within a new relational ontology.

Grazing the Body
Throughout ‘Becoming Alluvium’ the spectator is never given the privilege of distance or a singular narrative perspective, the effect of which is thoroughly disorientating. In one shot, the viewer is forced to watch a boat traversing the Mekong but the footage is upside-down, making it impossible to fathom direction. Further, the screen is often filled with vast expanses of water which eclipse the horizon, which make the experience of viewing the film often claustrophobic and nauseating; echoing Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s idea of disorientation as an ‘intellectual experience of disorder, but the vital experience of giddiness and nausea, which is the awareness of our contingency’ (qtd. in Ahmed 4). In Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects and Others, Sara Ahmed argues that ‘moments of disorientation are vital. They are bodily experiences that throw the world up, or throw the body from its ground’ (157). Thus, the disorientating visual quality of ‘Becoming Alluvium’ creates an awareness of the viewer’s bodily contingency with space and perturbs conventional epistemological binaries, such as subject-object, in the process. Like alluvium washing against the delta body, disturbing and reimagining its boundaries, moments of visual disorientation force the spectator to realign their own bodily parameters.

This effect is furthered by Phan’s use of ‘haptic visuality’: a filmic technique in which material presence is foregrounded, encouraging a close engagement with surface detail and texture (Marks 188). This occurs frequently in ‘Becoming Alluvium’: in one shot, the screen is entirely filled with the vibrant green shoots of water hyacinths, their dewy swollen buds barely discernible from each other. A moment later the viewer is submerged into their watery tendrils; the camera forever panning or ‘grazing’ the surface texture of the emerging objects (see fig.2). In these shots, Phan uses haptic visuality aopposed to optical visuality, ‘which sees things from enough distance to perceive them as distinct forms in deep space’ (Marks 162). According to Marks, haptic visuality “tends to move over the surface of its object rather than plunge into illusionistic depth, not to distinguish form so much as to discern texture. It is more inclined to move than to focus, more inclined to graze than to gaze (162). This sense of ‘grazing’, defined as the ‘act of touching lightly or rubbing against a surface in passing’ presumes a relation of interdependence or mutuality (“graze, n”). Within these moments of haptic visuality, there is a lack of separation between the viewing body and the object, and the spectator can be said to ‘respond in an embodied way’; becoming attuned to the object at hand, in this case, the delta environment, and muddying conventional subject-object epistemology (Marks 2). Like alluvial deposits washing over the delta body, simultaneously reconfiguring its borders, Phan’s saturation of the visual field through haptic visuality ‘grazes’ at the line of the body and leave ‘traces of that material exchange behind’ (Bremner).

The concept of saturation, both aesthetically and volumetrically, has recently received a considerable amount of critical attention within the field of new materialism. In Saturation: An Elemental Politics, Melody Joe and Rafico Ruiz state, “while saturation begins with water and watery metaphors, it is useful beyond water as a heuristic for thinking through co-present agencies, elements and phenomena that traverse ideological systems and substances alike (11). In ‘Becoming Alluvium’ Phan’s use of haptic visuality saturates the visual field of the onlooker, most notably with images of water, or if not water then mud. There are also moments when the spectator is brought close to the surface texture of the human skin (see fig. 3). Thus, we can argue that Phan works to bring the viewer close to the porosity and mutability of the body, in turn suggesting we are one and the same with the delta body; saturated, shifting and watery. Like alluvium saturating the delta body and confusing its being with ‘differentiated states of matter’, visual saturation disturbs the discrete nature of the human and ontologically opens the viewer up to the existence of ‘co-present agencies, elements and phenomena’ that interrupt the line of the skin.

Wet Ontologies
At this point, we might finally turn to the other component of Phan’s 2019 exhibition: ‘Perpetual Brightness’. Made in collaboration with the artist Truong Cong Tung, ‘Perpetual Brightness’ is an ‘installation of six dark-green lacquered frames stacked in rows of three’ (Churchman). The ‘back of the frames together depict the Mekong River, branching into its estuary at the delta in silver lead’, while the ‘front serves as a support for…Phan’s brightly coloured watercolour paintings on silk’ (Churchman). Despite its rigid and impending material quality, the medium of watercolour, lacquer and silk give the object a shimmering, translucent quality so it appears as if it is almost seeping, exceeding its material limits (see fig. 4). Further, the work requires the medium of water to exist “as lacquer paint can only dry in a relatively humid atmosphere, then the paint is sanded away under running water in order to reveal the layering of paint underneath; each lacquer panel is indeed an archaeological site” (“Perpetual Brightness - Thao Nguyen Phan”).

Taken together, ‘Perpetual Brightness’ and ‘Becoming Alluvium’ suggest that we cannot take stable things, such as a piece of art or the human body, as solid or fixed in nature. Rather, everything around us (including humans) is continually in flux, alive to meteorological and terrestrial processes that disturb conventional subject-object epistemology — as the title suggests, we are always in a sense becoming alluvium and vice versa. Phan’s exhibition urges us to reconsider human embodiment and attend to the geological processes that suggest “elements are not a neutral background, but lively forces” (Melody and Ruiz 1).

Conclusion
In conclusion, through an analysis of Phan’s 2019 exhibition Becoming Alluvium, this paper has sought to muddy the water of conventional subject-object epistemology to posit a new relational ontology of generative and collective becoming. It first explored how ‘Becoming Alluvium’ positions the viewer in the slow, transcorporeal geological processes of the delta. By doing so, it can be said to open up the body to similar processes, such as the deposition of alluvium; a process that blurs the boundaries between delta and sediment, subject and object, and human and non-human. Through an alluvial logic that grazes and ‘washes over’ the subject, Phan’s video piece works to disturb the line of the body by first disorienting the viewer and then saturating their field of vision. Finally, it considers how Phan posits a wet ontology in which things are always seeping and becoming, suggesting the mutability of the body to larger meteorological and geological processes and situating the human in a distributed field of agency.

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