The Dynamic Memory Lab (DML) is a dynamic space of remembrance. A participatory exhibition. A place of lived plurality. As a laboratory dedicated entirely to memory, it is dynamic, flexible, open, and unfinished. It invites visitors to share, pause, discuss, rethink, and reimagine—about what memory is and what society can be.

The DML Nước Đức focuses on Vietnamese-German migration history and asks how history is remembered and told—or suppressed and silenced.

The exhibition centres on the memories and experiences of the Viet-German community, shaped over decades by flight and contract labour, between the North and South of Vietnam, the East and West of Germany, and by histories of violence and acts of self-empowerment.

Curated by Dan Thy Nguyen and Nina Reiprich, the DML Nước Đức creates a space for experiences that are rarely considered in relation to one another, despite being deeply intertwined. Together, these stories form a field of tension that spans many political and social dimensions of the Cold War and the post-unification period—revealing both ideological ruptures and biographical entanglements.

The curators bring together contributions by artists and activists from the second generation of Viet-German immigrants who engage with Vietnamese-German migration history from multiple perspectives. They invite and urge to understand this history as part of a shared story, to question the boundaries of dominant memory discourses, and to strengthen memory as a social function.

Through artistic explorations, personal texts, and interview sequences, the exhibition explores the complex experiences of the Viet-German communities, exposing contradictions, ruptures, and gaps. These experiences are presented as a reciprocal space of reference: as memories of a plural community—and as memories of a plural society. They do not form a linear narrative but rather an interplay of different perspectives.

The exhibition raises central questions: Whose voices are heard? Which memories are given space? What remains in the shadows? And how can a shared, multi-perspective history be told?

The DML Nước Đức opens up a space for new, layered forms of collective remembrance.

The Dynamic Memory Lab Nước Đức opens on 20 September 2025 in Rostock as part of the heimaten Festival for Plural Democracy, accompanied by workshops, panel discussions, and artistic interventions.

More information about the program can be found here.