Send message to Contributor

Contribution short abstract

White Bowls Lost Souls is an integrated feminist research and arts project on intimate partner femicide in Vietnam, combining media analysis, documentary film and heritage ceramics.

Contribution long abstract

Lost Souls White Bowls is an integrated research and arts project on femicide in Vietnam. It begins with a systematic media analysis of femicide between 2018 and 2024, identifying 346 reported cases, the first systematic study of femicide in Asia. The findings shape a documentary film, a performance and installation, co-created with bereaved alongside feminist researchers, feminist journalists, lawyers, and service providers.

The feminist orientation of the installation “a Bowl of Love” is enacted through material, procedural, and institutional decisions. White heritage ceramic rice bowls from Bat Trang reference women’s burdens of care through rice cultivation, domestic labour, and spiritual practice, including the use of bowls for incense and communication with the dead. At the entrance in the national Vietnamese women’s museum, a large bowl carries the 346 names in hand-painted lettering, sober, resistant to spectacle.

During two workshops, participants share pre- and post-murder impacts, glaze and carve their own bowl, and make clay shoulder and back impressions. The bowls are placed on a monumental oval table covered with Vietnamese handwoven tussah silk, signalling dignity, history, femininity, labour. Embroidered water rings mark collective responsibility and the continuation of lives after death.

A wall of weapons drawn directly from the dataset confronts viewers; at the exit they may place a modest white flower in an unglazed vase, as acknowledgement not festive closure.

The project connects with research and artistic practices on public secrets, including What We Carry Forward, an installation and performance with families bereaved by femicide in the Netherlands.