On the occasion of the inauguration of the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, Trinh T. Minh-ha was invited to develop a video installation for the museum.¹ The piece, L'Autre marche (The Other Walk, 2006), which she realised in collaboration with Jean-Paul Bourdier, was located on a long, winding, serpentine-like ramp leading visitors to the exhibition spaces of the ethnographic museum, with video images projected on the floor and on two walls of the ramp, and shifting aphorisms in twelve different languages intermittently appearing and disappearing. Trinh created the images during twenty years of film-making in several continents. But more than the varied content of the images and its questioning of Eurocentric categorisation, it is the architectural setting - the fact that the piece sits in between spaces - that marks Trinh's artwork. She describes it thus:

The passage of the other into oneself, the course taken between sounds, images and aphorisms, or between the said and the seen along the ramp is an initiation walk that spans across several cultures of Asia, Africa, Oceania and America. With each step taken, relations between passage, passers-by and passing time are mutually activated. Questions raised through sensual experience could incite the visitor to reflect on his or her present activities as spectator-researcher-visitor. Meaning moves with walking and with the coming and going, appearing and disappearing of the lit aphorisms. The strolling along the ramp could turn out to be a 'rite of passage' whose fluid movement in three phases, 'Transition', 'Transformation' and 'Overture' is suggested accordingly through sounds and visual rhythms.²

The Vietnamese-American film-maker, artist and theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha is an influential and articulate