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R Like … Reunification – this is the same aspiration for all people who shared the same history whose destiny has diverged suddenly. The fate of the Vietnamese contemporary history can be read through the different names given to this place: Norodom Palace, Independence Palace, and Reunification Palace. For the memorial place, the choice is not made in Hanoi or Hue but in Saigon, as if the need for healing was the strongest for this city. Through its aesthetics and its history, the Reunification Palace in Ho Chi Minh City crystallizes the moments of the Vietnam War in which Photography played a decisive role for some key moments. President Kennedy's said about the immolation of the monk Thich Quang Duc in 1963: “No news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world as that one”. As a sign of destiny, I was able recently to retrieve this invaluable and original archive, also taken by a Vietnamese journalist who was unable to publish it at that time. This event is told in a secondary pavilion still remaining from the old Norodom Palace destroyed by a bomb, showing the tumultuous circumstances of the birth of this landmark. The Independence Palace, completed in 1966 by the architect Ngô Viết Thụ, winner of the Prix de Rome, was never inhabited by President Ngo Dinh Diem who requested its construction but by the next President who made him assassinated. It has become a museum since April 30, 1975 when tanks have crashed through its gates. Renamed as Reunification Palace, It is now the gathering place for all the city's major festivities and commemorations. The 40th anniversary of the “30 April 75” in 2015 showed a grandiose spectacle in front of the Palace where thousands of people reenacted the historical scenes with real tanks and trucks. National mourning on October 2013 was held in the Palace in tribute to General Vo Nguyen Giap, victorious over the French at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Vietnam and France in 2013, the neutral color of the building changed for a video mapping light show. Designed within the shapes of traditional ideograms, the façade favored the mapping of the star of the national flag. Beyond its historical image, today's youth preys it for its quality of icon of modernist art and the Palace is deconstructed under new sun lights into a different reality show. But still, the bowels of the country’s history where powers game has taken place for over a century are in the basement, a gray bunker with armored corridors. It remains these communications devices that have served to announce the latest chapter in a concert of bells and operators’ shouts. They secretly retain the voices of the past and their whispers still resonate as an echo of the sea in the hollow of a shell. The sufferings and joys, betrayals and reunions, the disorder and the desire committed in the name of Reunification are not extinguished. This photographic project during 10 years is part of my study on the relations between Photography and Archives - architecture, images and newspapers documents. Far from a nostalgic look, the strength of Photography goes beyond the visible, through its accumulation’s power of traces which are actualized at each shooting as in a new performance.

The practice of commemoration shows and speaks to us about how memory exercises its power on the masses. Quang Lam's work offers an excellent visual viaduct to its understanding by depicting the iconic history of the so-called Independence Palace of Vietnam. The building summarizes a hundred years of events that have marked the lives and memories of the people of Vietnam. A stormy past that he observes and investigates through an analysis of the archives as an exercise in visual archeology. Through photographs such as the "legendary" one by Malcolm Browne, which immortalizes the Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Ðức setting himself on fire in protest against the Saigon dictatorship in 1963. "No news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world as that, " said Kennedy. The music band Rage Against The Machine used it as the cover of the namesake album later in 1992. The re-educational path of this Vietnamese political landmark also takes shape from its visual representation and facade. And this reminds us of architecture as a manifestation of power. The original palace, the so-called Norodom Palace, was built by the French colonial regime and mirrored the European stylistic canons of the era. The current one, designed by Ngo Viet Thu, winner of the Rome Grand Prix and inaugurated in 1967, has a modernist impetus, still celebrated today. Also called the "Reunification" palace, a title oriented towards a process of reconciliation of the bloody subdivisions of the country. Quang Lam's photographs show us how the building and its corridors "secretly retain the voices of the past and their whispers still resonate as an echo of the sea in the hollow of a shell." He adds, "Far from a nostalgic look, the strength of Photography goes beyond the visible, through its accumulation's power of traces which are actualized at each shooting as in a new performance.". Those rooms that preserve vestiges frozen as in snapshots figure, in fact, as 3rd reproductions of the past. Like many monumental places, the Independence Palace is somehow a factory of memories that cast their shadow on the dreams and ambitions of future generations. The struggle between oblivion and free will always shape those gray areas.