An Act of Faith — Edén Barrena

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Title: An Act of Faith
Year: 2021
Medium: Ball pen on handmade Indian paper
Size: 14 x 19 cm
Series of 150 drawings

WORK

Henri Orger was an officer sent by the French government to the north of Vietnam at the beginning of the 20th century. After noticing a lack of studies on the local culture, he started an inventory of the customs from the region then known as Annam. Artists were commissioned to stroll through the streets of Hanoi in order to elaborate an exhaustive portrait of both private and social life. The resulting study registered the following items:

1. A technical vocabulary.

2. Graphic representation of instruments and tools, and the gestures involved in their use.

3. Household economy and how this was organised depending on the professional activity of each family (shoemaker, interpreters, shopkeeper, paper trader, etc.).

The enormous amount of collected information took the shape of a compendium of engravings with 4,000 drawings. The books were hardly printed at an improvised press at the Vu-Thach pagoda. Having no institutional support, this study remained forgotten.

In 2019, I stayed for a month at the artist residency A.Farm in Ho Chi Minh City (former Saigon). There, a colleague shared Henri Orger's drawings. As I had done in my previous encyclopaedia project, I decided to copy some of these drawings for study purposes and in order to improve my technical skills.