Tracing Kiều — Call for Submissions

Last updated: [September 10, 2025]

How does The Tale of Kiều speak to the Vietnamese diaspora today, across generations and geographies?
Join us in this creative challenge – choose your medium and add your voice.

View the full call below or download it (EN / DE / VN / FR). Scroll down for a short summary. See the menu above for our FAQs, project background, and more.

Project Introduction

How can a beloved 19th-century epic help us tell today’s stories of identity, movement, and belonging?

Nguyễn Du’s The Tale of Kiều (c. 1805), a cornerstone of Vietnamese literature, follows Thúy Kiều as she sacrifices her first love to save her family, navigating betrayal, loss, resilience, and eventual return. Its meditation on fate, compromise, and agency has shaped Vietnamese culture for over two centuries – and, like many world classics, continues to resonate far beyond its original context.

With Tracing Kiều, we invite creatives of the global Vietnamese diaspora to create new work in dialogue with this living classic, tracing connections between Kiều’s journey and diasporic experience today. A key method is bói Kiều – the folk practice of opening the poem at random for inspiration. We reinterpret this as a creative bridge, carrying a traditional practice into the 21st century and across the diaspora.

The project begins with a printed anthology and, if funding is secured, will expand into an exhibition, public program, and digital platform. While centred on Vietnamese diasporic voices, it speaks to broader conversations about cultural memory, translation, and decolonial futures.

Tracing Kiều is a grassroots project led by creatives from the Vietnamese diaspora, based in Berlin and holding US, Vietnamese, and German citizenship. We are grateful for advisory dialogue with the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN) and welcome partnerships with institutions, individuals, and communities worldwide.

Who Can Contribute

Our aim is to open The Tale of Kiều as a living space for dialogue – connecting voices across distance, shaped by migration and mixed heritage, and opening space for decolonial perspectives.

We welcome contributions from:

  • Writers, visual artists, designers, filmmakers, and performers across generations of the global Vietnamese diaspora.
  • Vietnam-based creatives, especially from marginalized or underrepresented communities.
  • Collaborative projects, including cross-media works, that bridge geographies and disciplines.

Beyond submitting work, you can support Tracing Kiều by collaborating, sharing the call, or contributing resources – every form of participation strengthens the project!

What We’re Seeking

We are building a cross-media anthology reimagining The Tale of Kiều through the lived perspectives of the Vietnamese diaspora, with selected works also envisioned for presentation in a Berlin exhibition (pending funding). Submissions may be new or existing works, and we encourage experimental and multilingual approaches.

Content
  • Short fiction, poetry, essays, creative dialogues/monologues, interview-based narratives (particularly if accompanied by visual material), and other hybrid text–image forms.
  • Illustration, comics, collage, photography, photo–text essays, and storyboards.
  • 2D documentation of installations, video, sound, performance, or other spatial and time-based concepts.
  • Selected works will be presented and invited for realization in the exhibition (pending funding).
  • Works in multiple languages are welcome; shorter contributions may appear bilingually (original + translation) to highlight the project’s focus on inheritance and translation.
Approach
  • Engage with Kiều as a living discourse and creative challenge: respond, reimagine, dialogue with, or critically confront the text.
  • Draw on bói Kiều as a method – whether literally (opening the poem at random for guidance) or more broadly, letting a verse, image, character, or theme spark new creative work.
  • Contributions will form part of a community archive of diasporic creativity, foregrounding diverse voices as producers of knowledge and as agents of inheritance and translation.
  • The exhibition will present text and visual works with curatorial framing and – pending funding – a program of talks, workshops, and performances that open space for decolonial perspectives on literature, memory, and identity.

Deadlines

  • Express interest: October 1, 2025 → mail@tracingkieu.net
  • Final submissions: December 2025 / January 2026. If you feel you need more time, just contact us.
  • Results: Spring 2026
  • Exhibition: 2027 in Berlin (pending funding), with possibilities for touring.

For details, see our FAQ and Submissions pages. If you still have questions, reach us via the contact form or at mail@tracingkieu.net.