Please join us at A-Z West on Saturday, June 13th at 6PM for a durational performance, concluding with a collective sunset gathering.
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MÁT MÁT MẮT is an evolving performance and installation by Minh H Phan that draws on ritual, language, food, and ecology to explore inherited trauma, colonial histories, and the possibilities of transcultural healing.
Rooted in Phan’s personal and familial history, the work emerged through a reckoning with the legacies of war, displacement, and colonial violence. Following news of her second Michelin star in 2022, Phan’s father responded with a reflection on Michelin’s origins in colonial rubber plantations—prompting the artist to confront the entanglements between recognition, memory, and historical violence.
This inquiry led Phan back to “Mom’s Garden”: a constellation of herbs, rituals, language, and inherited knowledge passed through generations. What began as an exploration of hospitality and culinary practice evolved into a vehicle for processing grief, reconciliation, and collective memory—shared through food, performance, and communal gathering.
The project developed through an ongoing dialogue with performance scholar Elizabeth McQueen and through Phan’s residency with Food Forward, where she examined systems of food waste and redistribution. During the residency, Phan encountered traces of the warehouse’s prior use as a bomb-making facility, deepening the project’s investigation into the intersections of food, labor, language, war, and infrastructure.
The first public iteration of MÁT MÁT MẮT—then titled Mom’s Garden—was presented in 2024 at Food Forward’s Pit Stop in Los Angeles. The work expanded in 2025 through a public iteration at the Manetti Shrem Museum, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon.
For its presentation with High Desert Test Sites, Phan continues this research through the ecology of the Mojave Desert. In dialogue with creosote—an industrially and militarily resonant desert plant—she engages in a site-responsive practice of observation, meditation, and listening, considering landscape as both witness and collaborator in processes of memory, grief, and repair.
MÁT MÁT MÁT will take place at A-Z West in the wash located alongside the Wagon Station Encampment at A-Z West. Directional signage will be visible on site, parking is available. This event is free and open to the public.
RSVP REQUESTED - Please reply to info@hdts.site by Friday, June 12th.