Title: Like Rain Falling from the Sky
Photographer(s): Nicola Bertasi
Writer(s): Damarice Amao, Nicola Bertasi
Designer(s): pupilla grafik
Publisher(s): Studiofaganel, Gorizia, Italy
Year: 2023
Print run: 300
Language(s): English
Pages: 144
Size: 21,5 x 27,5 cm
Binding: Hardcover
Edition:
Print: Poligrafiche San Marco, Cormons, Gorizia, Italy
Nation(s) and year(s) of Protest: Vietnam, 2017-2020
ISBN: 978-88-946628-5-6
Nicola Bertasi has focused his research on Vietnam with several trips to Vietnam between 2017 and 2020, a particular focus on what remains of war sites a landscape raped by American bombs.
As Damarice Amao writes in her introduction: "And it is along the lines leading to the creation of an alternative memory of Vietnam that Like the Rain Falling from the Sky is to be found: in quite an opposite direction compared to the shock imagery of traditional photo-reportage, and with the extended time necessary for enquiry and travel, piecing together a sensitive and poetical narrative drawing on the voices of those involved in the conflict, all too often ignored or forced to hold their silence....
....various victims' associations have seen their request for damages to be paid by American authorities rejected time and time and time again. In their everyday lives, these victims of war find themselves faced with an all-out denial of the consequences of ecocide by the Vietnamese government and part of society that prefers to look only to the future: technological progress, economic growth, opening up the country to tourism. Resilience has its price: that of amnesia. Through the personal testimonies of Like Rain, an anamnesis project is reinvented, no longer considered a mere exercise of nostalgia.