How to Touch the Elephant is a practice-based research project developing Shifting Modes of Witnessing, a framework for attending to the ecological trauma of post-Agent Orange landscapes in Vietnam. Where juridical and forensic frameworks have repeatedly failed to establish legal accountability for Agent Orange contamination, the research turns to artistic inquiry as an alternative form of witnessing. It asks what it means to touch these landscapes, and to be touched back. Grounded in fieldwork in Vietnam, the practice works through metal corrosion, expanded photography, soil sampling and mapping. It proposes three Modes of Witnessing – See, Touch, and Ngẫm* – and the necessity of shifting between them. The knowledge did not precede the practice. It emerged from it.

*Vietnamese for deep-thinking but also being submerged into something.

Agent Orange was one of the herbicides deployed by the U.S. military during Operation Ranch Hand in Vietnam from 1961 to 1971. It saturated the land and the bodies living on it with Dioxin, one of the most toxic substances known.¹ Decades later, the landscapes and the bodies still carry it. And yet: the International War Crimes Tribunal (1966–1967),² the Agent Orange Trial (1978),³ the case brought by Trần Tố Nga in 2014,³ all of them failed to establish legal accountability. The historical record exists. The scientific evidence exists. The bodies themselves exist as testimony. But the juridical and forensic frameworks, looking through their own apertures, refuse to see the landscapes.

This research is my attempt to touch the ecological trauma of the post-Agent Orange landscapes in Vietnam, through shifting modes of witnessing. Its central question is: What does it mean to touch the post-Agent Orange landscapes, and to be touched back, through shifting modes of witnessing? 

The methodology consists of fieldwork in post-Agent Orange sites in Vietnam, material intervention in the studio, and embodied drawing on-site. These methods are not the illustration of prior theoretical claims but the primary instrument of inquiry. The modes of witnessing proposed here did not precede the practice; they emerged from it.

This research extends beyond Vietnam and beyond Agent Orange. Military environmental violence has been systematically exempted from the frameworks designed to address ecological harm. The slow, multigenerational harm that began in Vietnam in 1961 is one instance of a structural condition that continues to be produced. My father’s body carries its own evidence of this – the bomb fragments that never left. To touch these landscapes is also to touch that inheritance, and to ask what it means to witness violence that the official systems have agreed not to see.

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