"This ongoing project revolves around felled trees and recurring dreams, ancestral wisdom and haunting apparitions.

Inspired by the massive cutting down of Khaya Senegalensis trees (a species native to West Africa) for urban development purposes on one of Saigon’s oldest streets, I explore the intersections between botanical studies and urban planning in Indochina, its link to other countries in the region and West Africa under the French colonial empire.

The project consists of a performance in 2018 on Tôn Đức Thắng street where 143 Khaya Senegalensis ranging from 100 to 150 years old were chopped down. Every day for a month I came and made rubbings of the left behind stumps.

In progress is also a number of short videos and a dramaturgy of fictional and factual characters who manifest themselves as spirits residing in trees intent on observing the present while murmuring unspoken stories from times gone by." [1]

_{[1] Lêna Bùi, “Projects,” /|/|/, 2023, https://www.lenabui.com/projects.}

"Precious. Rare. For Sale. takes a broad sweep at the presentation of nature in Vietnamese moving images from the 1990s. From being an abode for majestic and magical beasts, to serving as a backdrop for war heroics and social realist tragedies, representations of nature have been shaped by Vietnam’s changing socio-political contexts.
Reflecting on how filmmakers have portrayed the environment, Bùi questions the ethics of exploiting nature for the camera. While early ethnographic films shot by the French depicted the Vietnamese jungle as an untouched, primitive landscape, today’s images of razed forests and neatly-partitioned land plots reveal how nature has become a commodity for a rising middle-class. Captured on screen by property developers and thrill-seeking vloggers alike, nature’s images shape-shift constantly, feeding into an endless loop of mediated consumption." [2]

_{[2] Lêna Bùi, “Projects,” /|/|/, 2023, https://www.lenabui.com/projects.}

"Invoking the imagination of water as a conduit to spiritual realms, Lêna Bùi’s film poem contemplates reincar- nation in a mesmerising mosaic of sounds, languages, and images taken from different places and time peri- ods. The film opens and ends with water, passing through the underworld where boundaries between nations, species, and eras become porous. In this radically open state, we are free to flow between our own memories and those of the universal." [3]

_{[3] Text by Nguyen Dinh Ton Nu, taken from Echoes, Embers a Nhu Trang Trong Dem x Asian Film Archive film program. Made with the support of NTU CCA Residencies and Asia Culture Center, Gwanju.}