Tropical Siesta is a two-channel video that merges Phan Thao Nguyen’s delicate navigations around oral and written histories, and occluded and imagined narratives in present-day Vietnam. It tells an imaginary tale of rural Vietnam, informed by French Jesuit missionary Alexandre de Rhodes’ colourful observations during his travels in the 17^th century. The universe Nguyen created is one populated only by children, who make up an agricultural community. They engage not only in farming work, but play games of make-believe – playfully recreating, for instance, various barbaric methods of punishment, as well as the folktale of the Water Goddess. In Tropical Siesta, narratives of play, poetry and local myth are interwoven to create a utopic film about the colonised tropical regions.

Phan Thao Nguyen (b. 1987, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam) is a multimedia artist and the co-founder of the cross-disciplinary collective Art Labor which develops art projects that benefit the Vietnamese community. Phan has exhibited widely in Vietnam and abroad, including as part of the travelling group exhibition ‘Concept Context Contestation: Art and the Collective in Southeast Asia’ (2015). She is the Grand Prize winner of the APB Foundation Signature Art Prize (2018). She lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.