PLANT STORIES #6: HANDHELD FRAGMENTS
Lecture Performance by Minh Duc Pham
04 OCTOBER 2025 / 17:30
Handheld Fragments is a performative exploration of the species Orchidaceae. Often stigmatized as delicate, complicated, and exotic, it is also a master of adaptation, deception, and radical survival skills.
Employing botanical knowledge, biographical fragments, and poetic superimposition, Minh Duc Pham’s lecture performance addresses queer and migrant upbringing, care, and separation. Traces of past care, faded relationships, and the quiet endurance of the in-between condense into an attempt at remembrance.
The orchid refuses clear attributions and moves between visibility and masquerade, between adaptation and resistance. Its ability to imitate, its early dependence on other life forms, and its aesthetic staging point to fluid identities and the necessity of care and symbiosis. In its appearance and strategy, the orchid is also reminiscent of the practice of drag—performative, seductive, dazzling, and deeply political. In reference to the epiphytic growth form of the orchid, Handheld Fragments searches for relationships that arise in the indeterminate, the hidden, and the fractured.
The lecture performance is held in German.
MINH DUC PHAM is a visual artist and performer. He studied exhibition design at the HfG Karlsruhe and performance studies and design theory at the UdK Berlin. In his artistic practice, he addresses questions of identity and negotiates them at the intersections of gender, race, and class. His works have been exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts Leipzig, the Dresden City Museum, and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), among others. He has also participated in various theater and performance productions, including Die Große Klassenrevue at HAU1, Home Away From Home at the Cloud Gate Theatre in Taipei, and Semiotiken der Drecksarbeit at Mousonturm Frankfurt.