argos is home to Belgium’s largest collection of over 6,000 moving image works and artist films. Every month, we dive into our audiovisual archives to curate a work that resonates with current affairs or exhibitions, free for you to watch and enjoy on our website.

This month, we have selected a work that aligns with the themes of defiance and resistance in our upcoming exhibition What the Land Remembers — Counter-Archives from Iran.

Esther Johnson, Liberation Radio (2021)
13’40”
English, Vietnamese, Swedish spoken.
English and Vietnamese subtitles.

In 1968, a group of American military deserters went to the North Vietnamese mission in Stockholm with one objective in mind: to join the army they had been drafted to fight. Instead, they were recruited for the propaganda war — and used magnetic tape, pop music, and political rhetoric to persuade other American servicemen to desert. Their recordings were transported from Sweden to Vietnam by diplomatic bag and broadcast from transmitters on the rooftops of Hanoi and from revolutionary bases in the countryside.

This installation work by artist and filmmaker Esther Johnson, sound artist Nguyễn Nhung, and historian Matthew Sweet revives that circuit of communication five decades later.

With contributions from some of the surviving American deserters, Swedish anti-war activists, and Vietnamese journalists of the period, the voice of Liberation Radio speaks again.