Christina Ly

About

Christina Ly is a designer and researcher currently based in London, UK. Prior to studying at the Royal College of Art, Christina completed her BA(Hons) Architecture (ARB/RIBA Part 1) at the University for the Creative Arts. She has since worked at a number of architectural practices, predominantly working on boutique hotels, private residentials and collaborative living & working spaces. In addition to this Christina has also worked on several large scale commercial and retail developments with clienteles’ projects being based across the UK, France, Hungary and Italy.

Shadows of Agent Orange – ‘Bóng Tối Của Chất Độc Da Cam’

Location – U Minh Thuong National Park, Kien Giang, Vietnam

As a living entity, I move through the landscape, a realm once vibrant with life, now shadowed by agent orange. The dioxins, remnants of a conflict past, course through me, marking the earth, the water, and the very air with their toxic legacy. My veins, the rivers, and my breath, carry the silent yet potent echoes of this poison, affecting not just the flora and fauna that call me home, but also the inhabitants, the children of this land, who bear the unseen scars of exposure. As agent orange’s toxic rain fell on large areas towards the far south of Vietnam, it left scars that never aged, forests stripped, landscapes tarnished, rivers tainted and left barred.

Agent orange, a defoliant used by the U.S. military in the Vietnam war (1955-1975). Over 20 million gallons was sprayed, affecting forests, crops and inhabitants in Southern Vietnam. A wartime brew, composed of 2,3-D and 2,4,5-T, contained traces of Dioxin TCDD, a substance deemed carcinogenic by the Environmental Protection Agency. While agent orange degrades quickly, Dioxin TCDD persists for decades, contaminating ecosystems up to 50 to 100 years.

U Minh Thuong Wetland, encircled by a protective halo buffer zone with over 3,500 households and rice paddy field allotments is a landscape forever altered by the shadows of agent orange’s toxic legacy, leaving subtle scars on both nature and those who call it home. However, the land, seized after the war from absentee landlords and allocated to tenant farmers under the 1970 land holding reform policy, still battles with heavy dependence on monoculture farming practices. The policy deeply etched its mark across southern Vietnam, shaping the landscape into a checkerboard of rice monoculture plantations, rigidly enforcing an industrialised grid upon the land, where the vast, uniform fields of rice stretch as far as the eye can see, a green sea of sameness that speaks of efficiency but whispers of ecological carelessness.

Yet, amidst this harsh reality, a vision for restoration emerges, to blur and merge the land, proposing communities and families of rice to heal and remediate this wounded environment. ‘Shadows of Agent Orange’ proposes a new imaginary approach that integrates land regeneration practices designed to support agro-biodiversity. In phases, would cultivate a diversity of seasonal rice crops to improve microbial community in the soil, phytoremediation through planting species that metabolises dioxins in the ground and reviving traditional living spaces and amenities.

Supported By Burberry Design Scholarship