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Ném is a Sài Gòn-based design studio built on a practice rooted in upcycled objects, exploring how design can reshape the relationship between people and the things that surround them, with an approach grounded in practicality, simplicity, and a willingness to challenge conventional ways of seeing and making.

Hiếu will share two of his key projects: Street Objects, an ongoing body of work that transforms discarded, street-sourced materials, from scrap wood and metal to reclaimed skateboards, into furniture, lighting, and everyday objects with new life; and The New Comfort Shanghai, a project and workshop held at the Rockbund Museum that extended Ném's material philosophy to a new city and context.

Through these projects, Hiếu will walk through how Ném questions what is considered valuable or worth preserving, and how each object emerges through experimentation, often revealing new possibilities in overlooked materials. Handmade in-house and produced in limited quantities, these objects reflect a considered relationship between material, craft, and contemporary life.

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Drawing from everyday observations of Vietnamese streets, traditional tube houses, and collective housing, Sanuki explores how informal activities, shared thresholds and natural ventilation shape an architecture that is continuously transformed by its users. Rather than prescribing fixed functions, his work begins by protecting emptiness, allowing buildings to evolve through climate, vegetation and daily life.

Through built projects and field-based reflections, the talk considers how architecture can learn from existing social and spatial practices instead of replacing them. It proposes a design approach rooted in openness, flexibility and the evolving relationship between people and place.

Resonating with the VFCD Living Festival's exploration of creativity as a living system, Sanuki's practice demonstrates how architecture can become an active framework for participation, collective memory and the continual production of everyday life.

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Featuring photography, documentary films and architectural models, the exhibition presents the work and philosophies of 22 local and international architects and designers whose practices continue to shape the region's changing cultural and urban landscape.
Aligned with the Vietnam Festival of Creativity & Design's Living Festival theme, the exhibition positions architecture not as a collection of finished buildings, but as an ongoing dialogue between people, communities, culture and place. Through the visual storytelling of Chimnon Studio, visitors are invited to encounter the creative processes, collaborations and lived experiences that inform each project, revealing how design evolves through continuous exchange with its social and environmental context.
Rather than documenting architecture as static objects, the exhibition celebrates creativity as a dynamic ecology sustained through observation, experimentation and collaboration. The combination of photographs, films and models creates opportunities for reflection, discussion and participation, connecting local design practices with wider regional and global conversations. Together, these diverse perspectives demonstrate how architecture becomes a living cultural practice—one that is continually redefined through the relationships between designers, communities and the places they collectively shape.

The Architects and Designers:
Coca Huynh (Director)
1. Tad.A | Architectural Atelier. Vu Tien An (Vietnam)
2. K59 | Architectural Atelier. Nam Phan and Linh Cam Tran (Vietnam)
3. SDA | Architectural Atelier. Sanuki Daisuke (Japan)
4. Tropical Space | Architectural Atelier. Tran Thi Ngu Ngon & Nguyen Hai Long (Vietnam)
5. G8A | Architectural Atelier. Manuel De Hagopian (Switzerland)
6. MIA Studio | Architectural Atelier. Nguyen Hoang Manh (Vietnam)
7. Laita | Architecture and Design Atelier. Hoa Dinh Nguyen and Nguyen T. Thai. Hang (Vietnam)
8. G+ | Architectural Atelier. Giang Doan (Vietnam)
9. Kaze | Architectural Atelier. Fong Chan Paw Zeuthen (Denmark)
10. sgnhA | Architectural Atelier. Nguyen Duc Tuan Anh and Tran Quoc Khoi Nguyen (Vietnam)
11. The Lab Saigon | Architectural Atelier. Tuan Le (Vietnam)
12. H.A workshop | Architectural Atelier. Huu Vuong Trung (Vietnam)
13. T3 | Architectural Atelier. Rafael Lira (Brazil)
14. AD+ | Architectural Atelier. Dang Anh Dung (Vietnam)
15. Tho.A | Architectural Atelier. Pham Nhan Tho (Vietnam)
16. Oh. Hi Studio | Architectural Atelier. Interview: Vu Duc Nguyen and Tao Thuc Trinh (Vietnam)
17. HTAP | Architectural Atelier. Interview: Archie Pizzini (Mexico)
18. Passive Design | Architectural Atelier. Interview: Khang van Huynh (Vietnam)
19. AAAAA | Architectural Atelier. Interview: Triet Le (Vietnam)
20. HTAP | Architectural Atelier. Interview: Hoanh Tran (Vietnam)
21. Nu Architecture and Design | Architectural Atelier. Interview: Jonathan Ng and Yumie Le (Australia)
22. H.2 workshop | Architectural Atelier. Interview: Tran Van Huynh & Nguyen Duy The (Vietnam)

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Centred on Chợ Lớn Mới and its surrounding streets, the walk moves through the rhythms of the morning market, where trade, movement, sound, smell, and everyday negotiation reveal the layered character of this historic urban quarter. Rather than treating the city as a fixed object, the trail invites participants to observe Chợ Lớn as a living condition, shaped by commerce, migration, religious life, informal exchanges, and the dense spatial relationships between buildings, streets, and people. Travelling on foot allows a slower and more attentive encounter with the city. Small details, such as shopfronts opening, market goods arriving, alleyway activities, signage, thresholds, and changing light, become clues for understanding how urban life is produced. The trail concludes at Nhà thờ Giáo xứ Phanxicô Xaviê, or St Francis Xavier Church, by approximately 8:30 a.m., before the heat intensifies. Through this walk, Chợ Lớn is approached not simply as a destination, but as an urban text to be explored, read, and reconsidered from ground level.

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The session opens with a short presentation introducing different methods of mapping, from official, top-down cartography to more personal, experience-based ways of recording a place through walking, listening, and observation.

Participants will use the fieldwork framework that Lon Xon Studio has developed through its ethnographic and field research in the Mekong Delta, applying it here to build up an array of alternative ways of mapping and understanding the place. They will head out into the city to gather material, impressions, conversations, and details that don't usually make it onto a map.

Open to the general public, with a focus on young people and artists, this workshop is an invitation to look at the everyday differently, and to document it in your own hand.

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Hosted within the OUT-2 Design studio and our designXchange space, the event combines a curated exhibition of selected architectural and interior design projects with a guided studio tour and an interactive Design Intelligence Lab.

The exhibition brings together projects deliberately selected to reflect diverse building typologies, clients, cultural contexts, geographic locations and design disciplines. Rather than presenting projects solely as finished artefacts, it reveals the thinking, judgement and iterative decision-making that shaped their development, demonstrating how Design Intelligence emerges through, and responds to, varied conditions of practice.

Participants will engage in a facilitated laboratory session exploring how Design Intelligence can be recognised, interrogated and applied through comparative design scenarios and open discussion. The session invites participants (including architects, designers, researchers and students) to reflect on how Design Intelligence emerges through practice, and how it can be recognised, transferred and continuously refined.

Aligned with the VFCD 2026 Living Festival theme, the event positions creativity as an evolving process sustained through dialogue, participation and shared enquiry. It seeks to create an open environment where professional experience, research and public engagement intersect, demonstrating how design contributes not only through completed projects, but also through the architectural knowledge, professional judgement and Design Intelligence that underpin them.

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This Living Laboratory Workshop reframes reflective needlecraft as a practice shaped by, rather than despite, the fragmented time of urban life. Drawing on Vietnamese calligraphic scroll traditions (thư pháp), where words such as Tâm (Heart/Mind) unfold as visual poetry over a vertical field, this workshop shifts from ink to thread, inviting participants to build textile scrolls as ongoing carriers of memory, place, and self.

Rather than treating the scroll as a finished artwork, it is approached as an accumulative surface: something rolled, unrolled, and returned to in short, uneven sessions, mirroring how most people actually live and create. Using accessible stitches, limited colour palettes, and small design containers, participants begin with whatever time they have — ten minutes or two hours — and add to their scroll without pressure to complete it.
Sessions are grounded in a situated, plural, care-ful co-stitching framework. Care is embedded in practical choices, and Pluralism is honoured by welcoming participants regardless of motivation: curiosity, reflection, social connection, or simply a place to sit. The scroll format itself models fragmented practice: each session contributes a layer, visually archiving the accumulation of small, attentive acts over time.

I propose two sessions across the festival period or preferably one extended drop-in laboratory, adaptable to festival scheduling, each accommodating up to 15 participants seated on mats around low tables. Co-design will live on after the workshop: Participants may contribute via small travel kits, returning images on a community page, and brief reflections, extending the living scroll beyond the physical site and into participants' own fragmented daily rhythms.

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Of Fading Blooms
By Sulla Ngan Nguyen

Logline: At a mysterious facility, a young woman decides to travel back in time to prevent her parents from ever meeting.

Director’s Statement:
Giữa đại dương ta hát tình ca (Among the Ocean, We Sing Love Songs) is my wish for peace and well-being for my parents, whether or not I am still by their side. Developed and completed in just two weeks, the film is based on a song I wrote for my parents ten years ago. It is also an attempt to reconnect with the place where I was born: the city of Nha Trang, which was dissolved in July 2025.

For a long time, I felt deeply guilty that my existence had made my parents’ lives more difficult. I wanted to make this film as a form of psychological release—forgiving and encouraging myself for having existed, and for continuing to exist. I also want to thank my parents for giving me such a beautiful childhood.

It took me a very long time to find the courage to write this statement and the film’s ending. I would also like to thank everyone who accompanied me during this difficult period of my life, and who helped me create a more compassionate ending for the characters.

In the end, I hope the film can be told as a gesture of consolation—as an embrace for families that are not whole.

Mahatup
By Khoi Nguyen

Mahatup is a documentary film with two channels, showcasing the efforts of the people in Soc Trang, Vietnam.
The left side of the screen focuses on the land, water, and fences, while the right side of the screen describes the culture, way of life, and reforestation efforts. The work emphasises the two battles that the Khmer people in Soc Trang are facing: they are determined to preserve their cultural identity, and the race against the sea as it encroaches on the land by planting tree fences to fix the land. The Khmer people are building fences to protect their work.

Pillars
By Andrew Stiff

HCMC is rapidly modernising which presents challenges for the city’s culture of place, ways of knowing and being that do not align with the modernisation agenda. Pillars is a film that emerges from a broader creative practice that aims to document the everyday city as it rapidly transforms. My films do not engage directly with the politics of the city; rather, they remain fascinated by the spaces where everyday life unfolds and which make Ho Chi Minh City such a vibrant and engaging place.

Prototyping Permission: Animated Urban Popups
By Graham Crist

This design project investigates and communicates notions of urban permissioning and micro urbanism through a short film animating three micro urban pop-up projects in North Melbourne’s under-used laneways. The projects, under the themes of non human habitat, micro energy generation, and pop-up housing, demonstrate how physical and spatial design interventions can activate permissioning tools as virtual/digital platform. The former acts as the urban hardware, to the latter’s software. Permissioning tools can greatly intensify the use of city environments, improving both their community amenity and their carbon footprint. Such tactics have interesting implications for cities in Vietnam which already have advanced cultures of shared urban permissioning.

Chung cư Project 2026: Living Heritage and Community Resilience
By Giuseppe de Francesco and Tran Thi Minh Chau

The "Chung cư Project 2026" perfectly embodies the VFCD 'Living Festival' theme by positioning the heritage of old apartment buildings in Ho Chi Minh City not as fixed ruins, but as an active, evolving living condition. Through a project-based filmmaking workshop, we combine archival sensibilities of architectural history with field-based inquiry into the social fabrics and lived experiences of local residents. By utilizing ethnographic filming and co-developing narratives directly with the community, the project documents the residents' continuous exchange with their place and practices.

The resulting short documentary films serve as public engagement tools, transforming everyday stories into a dynamic ecology of dialogue. This initiative highlights the resilience of the community and advocates for sustainable preservation, demonstrating how these architectural spaces are shaped by those who participate in them.

Du Long Du Canh: how to listen to the hands that make.
By Du Long Du Canh

The Mekong Delta, though only a few hours southwest of Ho Chi Minh City, remains surprisingly little understood, despite the fact that many HCMC residents have hometowns and relatives there. Most understandings of the Delta are filtered through comparison with ""the city,"" leaving its treasures of knowledge and craft overlooked and at risk of being forgotten. Interest in the region often skews toward analytical research, spoken in a language alien to the practitioners themselves, bypassing the perspective of the very people who uphold these crafts and beliefs.

Du Long Du Canh is a film duo who, through the eyes of two young travelers moving through the Mekong Delta, bring a personal touch to the stories of craftspeople and their ties to the land's spirit and environment. They travel the Delta, often lending a hand to the communities they stay with, learning and listening to the stories of the hands that make things. Their filmmaking blends ethnographic method with artistic storytelling, not dwelling in nostalgia, but showing how a new generation is discovering the vitality of the land and working to sustain the stories that shaped their childhood.

This event screens several of their episodes, followed by a Q&A that dives deeper into their method: how they engage with communities, how they find communities that often don't exist on maps, and a look into their storytelling narrative.

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Each floor is curated by one of our four allied initiatives: LAITA Design, LAITA Store, AXIS Workshop and Museum of Design (MoD). Rather than showcasing products or completed projects alone, each platform is organised around a provocative question that invites visitors to reconsider the role of architecture, objects, craft and cultural institutions in everyday life. Together, these parallel experiences reveal different ways design can be observed, questioned and continuously reimagined.

Visitors are encouraged to move through the building as they would through an evolving landscape of ideas, where research, experimentation, manufacturing, exhibition and public dialogue exist as one interconnected practice. The event proposes that creativity is not an isolated act of production but an ongoing process of observation, collaboration and adaptation.

Aligned with the Living Festival theme, the programme presents design as something that grows through people, place and shared experience. Rather than offering definitive answers, it creates a space for conversation, reflection and collective imagination, demonstrating how design can remain a living practice embedded within everyday life.

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This showroom exhibition and public talk invite visitors to explore how existing buildings can be thoughtfully reimagined to create meaningful spaces for learning, dialogue and creative exchange. Rather than erasing history, Tempo Nexus embraces a philosophy of "doing as if nothing was done," carefully preserving the character of the building while allowing it to evolve for contemporary use.

Aligned with the Vietnam Festival of Creativity & Design's Living Festival theme, the event positions creativity as an ongoing conversation between past and present, people and place. Through discussions on adaptive reuse, participants will discover how heritage buildings can become living environments that foster collaboration, reflection and cultural continuity. The accompanying talk will examine the role of architects, researchers, anthropologists and local communities in preserving urban identity while responding to the changing needs of the city.

Bringing together designers, students, researchers and the public, the event celebrates creativity as a living ecology sustained through shared experiences and collective stewardship. It demonstrates how careful restoration, interdisciplinary collaboration and respect for local history can generate new possibilities for Vietnam's evolving urban landscape while strengthening connections between heritage, contemporary design and community.

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Twelve thúng chài become vessels for a living archive, carrying songs, voices, rituals and fragments of memory across generations, asking: Which ancestors do we dream forward? The 15 min talk. will be followed by a sensory & embodiment workshop to explore how ancestral memory stays alive not through preservation, but through movement, encounter and reassembly, thus becoming the thirteenth thúng chài - the future ancestor carrying the mortal stake in the present.

Songs. Chants. Conversations. A forgotten tune. A familiar love song. The cries of street vendors. A fisherman recalling the sea. An elder speaks of a far-away world. The metro announcer. Children chanting nursery rhymes. Layer upon layer of memory calling across generations, some only yesterday, some still arriving.

This is not purely an art installation. It is a time-space sonic field where we actively seek the construction of meaning. The vessel maps a living archive of collective human dreaming like a continuous crossing of thresholds. By day, it is a sanctuary – an invitation to simply be and fully immerse yourself in the collective stream of sounds. As evening falls, the space transforms into a new-ancient womb for multi-disciplinary workshops led by curated artists.

You are invited not just to be a witness, but to be a co-creator. Let's cross over together.

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A Sonic-Art Installation On Ancestral Memory
Do Baskets Dream Of ___
Twelve thúng chài basket boats voyage to Ho Chi Minh City, not as static objects but as living artefacts seeking their own migration of meaning. They once learnt to be woven, to harvest, to carry, and then to float. Now they are learning to dream.

The installation is presented at ARTSPACE (S6) from 22–27 September 2026, 10:00 AM–9:00 PM, alongside the Artist Talk.

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Xẩm Chợ
by Hung Tran
When night falls, Đồng Xuân Market is more than a physical site of commerce; it becomes a “transitional space” where the hurried rhythms of modern life intersect with echoes of the past. At the heart of this intersection are Xẩm singing and the piercing sound of the đàn cò (two-string fiddle, also known as đàn nhị) – an original form of street music that once flourished but is now gradually being drowned out and buried beneath the noise of the city.
Rejecting traditional methods of physical reconstruction, this project utilises technology as an intermediary medium, empowering young audiences to navigate through the "sonic interference" of the present to actively discover and interact with the vocal heritage of master Xẩm artisan Hà Thị Cầu. Through this approach, the installation establishes a symbolic, intergenerational dialogue between modern technology and traditional folk music.

Hỉ, Nộ, Ái, Ố: Echoes of the Inner World
by Chau Anh Nguyen (Cece)
In an era defined by rapid flux and ontological uncertainty, the human capacity to perceive and process emotional reality becomes our primary navigational tool. Yet, within Vietnamese culture, a long-standing emphasis on emotional restraint and the stoic ideal of "strength" often leads to the suppression of the inner self. Many are conditioned to believe that to be strong is to be silent, and to be resilient is to remain impenetrable.

"Hỉ, Nộ, Ái, Ố: Echoes of the Inner World" is an interactive exhibition and "living laboratory" that explores and allows talks and the mirror of four fundamental pillars of human emotional experience—Hỉ (Joy), Nộ (Anger), Ái (Love), and Ố (Sadness/Dislike).

Why does this matter? It challenges this paradigm and serves as a vital intervention, reframing emotional expression not as a weakness, but as an act of courage.

Deconstructing the stoic ideal: We treat the suppression of feelings as a social "data point" that requires transformation. This exhibition creates a safe, protected "Laboratory" where the act of releasing emotion, whether through joy, anger, love, or sadness, is celebrated as a fundamental human function.

From suppression to synthesis: By providing a physical space to externalize these feelings, we allow participants to witness their own inner worlds. When an emotion is given form, through light, sound, or touch, it expands its power and relates to others.

A communal act: By moving these feelings from the private sphere into a shared, public gallery, we validate the collective experience. We demonstrate that navigating uncertainty is not an individual struggle to be endured in silence, but a shared human journey to be explored together, especially in an ever-changing world that we’re in today.

Living Familial Archives
by Ly Du Khanh Han
Living Familial Archives explores how play-based design can support intergenerational storytelling, memory-making, and family communication within Vietnamese contexts. The project responds to the fragile ways family stories are often passed down: not as complete records, but through casual recollections, jokes, silences, advice, and moments of emotional readiness. As family structures and generational expectations continue to shift, these informal moments of transmission can become interrupted, leaving personal and familial histories vulnerable to loss.

The work takes the form of a collection of playful prototypes, including a childhood memory card deck, an activity book, a hybrid board game, and an interactive digital story archive. These artefacts invite participants to move gradually from light memory-sharing into deeper reflection on generational experience, family values, and inherited tensions.
For VFCD 2026’s Living Festival, the project contributes to the idea of a living archive as an evolving system shaped by people, exchange, and participation. It treats ordinary family stories as cultural memory and proposes play as a gentle method for keeping these memories active, relational, and open to continuation.

Tetromino
by Vian Nguyen
Tetromino examines urbanization in Vietnam through the unstable domestic lives of students and workers who migrate from smaller provinces to major cities for education and employment. The work focuses on the intimate architecture of temporary living: dormitories, boarding houses, shared rooms, rented apartments, and the repeated movement between them.

Drawing from the structure of tetromino blocks, the work treats rooms, bodies, memories, and personal belongings as modular forms that are continuously rotated, compressed, displaced, and rearranged. Each configuration reflects the effort required to adapt to limited space, rising costs, changing work conditions, and uncertain belonging. Familiar objects reappear across different spatial arrangements, suggesting that home is not a fixed location but a fragile construction rebuilt through habit, memory, and necessity.

Through modular installation, shifting structures, and traces of everyday movement, Tetromino interacts, records and reveals the emotional space beneath rapid urban growth. The work asks how much individuals must transform themselves to fit within cities that are constantly expanding, rebuilding, and erasing their previous forms.

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Hào Sĩ Phường is one of the few remaining Chinese community residential compounds in Ho Chi Minh City that has retained much of its distinctive architectural and cultural character. However, these values have yet to generate meaningful benefits for the resident community, leaving the heritage increasingly vulnerable to deterioration amid demands for renovation and development.

The project began with the adaptive reuse of an old house as the AD+studio office, introducing a new function into the existing structure as a way of demonstrating that heritage can continue to adapt and engage with contemporary life. Building on this foundation, the office has become a point of connection between visitors and the local community, incorporating an exhibition space that showcases handicrafts and handicraft products while telling the story of Hào Sĩ Phường.

From there, the journey extends to houses that have retained their original structures, as well as spaces preserving artefacts and everyday objects associated with the lives of the Chinese community within the Hào Sĩ Phường compound itself. In this way, the project connects these spaces into a continuous experience, helping to communicate Hào Sĩ Phường’s architectural and cultural values while generating additional activities and sources of income for the local community.

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Nguyen Art Foundation (NAF) invites you to join an art tour for the exhibition Mạch Ngầm [counter-place], a group exhibition featuring artists: Vo An Khanh, An-My Le, Truong Cong Tung, Ngoc Nau, Nguyen Trinh Thi, Nguyen Thi Thanh Mai, Tuan Mami, Nguyen Thai Tuan and Phan Anh.

Curated by Vicky Do, the exhibition develops from an ongoing thesis conceived in the form of an Atlas. Taking the landscapes that underlie the artworks at its point of departure, the thesis draws upon concepts from geography and geology to reconsider history and human’s place within the environments that have witnessed the rise and fall of civilizations. Centering landscape not as a passive backdrop, this exhibition-as-a-thesis proposes an archaeological investigation into the counter-places that exist alongside and beneath officially recognized places, examining and analyzing them through the conceptual propositions embedded within the exhibited artworks and their installations. Contemporary art is a byproduct of the social and political conditions from which it emerges and, whether intentionally or not, invariably carries within it the discourses of its time. If territories are drawn by political institutions, then the map of counter-places rejects such definitions and impositions through texts – a medium capable of giving form to intangible abstractions. This Atlas can be seen as a form of fictional writing, drawn from the gaps between artworks, attempting to chase the unseen through the imaginative possibilities that fiction gifts us with.

Mạch Ngầm [counter-place] is the first thesis presented as part of Within & Beyond: a Taxonomy in Exhibition-making – a year-long educational and curatorial initiative launched by Vicky Do. Exploring the different phases and methodologies of meaning-making through exhibitions, Within & Beyond: A Taxonomy in Exhibition-making approaches these questions via the notion of the Survey of Landscape – the central framework for this year’s edition. Traditionally associated with scientific classification – the mapping of lands, environments, settlements, and ecological formations – taxonomy here is expanded toward and through cultural, political, emotional, and speculative perspectives. No longer merely a physical site, landscape becomes a structure through which ideologies, histories, economies, spiritualities, and human relationships unfold. To survey a landscape, therefore, is also to examine the systems and people that shape visibility, belonging, displacement, and imagination.

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Conversation: Exploring Composer–Performer Co-Creation Through an NLP-Driven Interactive Performance System
by Brigitta Thetrasakti
Conversation is a space to express the story of us, a composer and a performer who have a personal connection and share familiarity. This meaningful collaboration transforms personal stories of us into dialogic performance, shapes the creative process and outcome, yet shows the performer’s role in co-creation.

Drawing upon memories and in-depth conversations with the performer as compositional material, the project transforms personal conversation (keywords) into an interactive performance that foregrounds dialogue and mutual influence. The work evolves through interactions between piano and live electronics, allowing creative decisions to happen in real time.

To support the composer's real-time responses, a technological framework integrating Python 3, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Vosk Speech Recognition, and Max/MSP was developed. Within this framework, the performer's spoken responses are translated into keywords that trigger electronic sounds, enabling the composer to shape the live electronics as part of an ongoing musical dialogue.

The performance unfolds as a dialogue of actions in which the performer’s decisions directly influence the composer’s responses. Through the interactive performance of Conversation, both creators share equal responsibility in shaping the creative process and the live performance. The outcomes occur in real time based on the performer’s decisions.

Conversation presents co-creation as a real-time dialogue in which shared experiences become compositional material and both the composer and the performer actively shape the evolving musical work.

Opening (Mở)
by Hang Phan
In a time when urban life grows increasingly automated, MỞ proposes a living laboratory to dissect and resynchronize our relationship with the city. Rooted in the subject area of Living Communities, this project responds to the VFCD 2026 "Living Festival" theme by treating Ho Chi Minh City not as a static backdrop, but as a living, breathing macro-body where each citizen functions as a vital, pulsating cell of collective movement.

We are not presenting a finished choreography. Instead, MỞ proposes an unscripted, process-driven laboratory based on the three fundamental elements of Mettler-based Creative Dance: Space, Time, and Force. Here, the public is invited to step in as active co-researchers.

Inside the workshop, participants investigate these three elements in real time. They reclaim their internal pace by tuning into collective movement pulses. They rebuild interpersonal trust by exploring the physical dialogue between active forces and passive yielding. Finally, they use ordinary, localised objects to extend their spatial awareness into the surrounding urban architecture.

As these elements naturally blend, what emerges is a real-time blueprint of a reconnected urban ecosystem. MỞ demonstrates that a city’s true vitality does not come from its concrete infrastructure, but from the conscious, shared rhythm of its people.

Alba
by Matthias Waldhart
I keep thinking about the shirt you take because it is nearest, and how it is not yours, and how nobody says anything about this. A sleeve is just a sleeve until an arm, you know, has been in it. My extension becomes your home, and your ceremony in the warp.
Alba is the Provençal name for a poem sung at dawn, when lovers must part. The “boyfriend” shirt. A garment as a shared space of togetherness. An object loaded with intimacy, gendered assumption and unspoken permission. Occupied and performed by strangers, reading their chosen aubades to each other. A waking poem to usher in the dawn of a tender day. Sitting inside someone else’s clothes, temporarily. Such a delicate form of physical closeness that we practise without naming it. A borrowed shirt, shared by many rather than two, occupies the function of a room: holding people close enough to sit together. To read together. Reading, as the ultimate act of closeness. Legere, to gather, as the Latin origin of this meaning. Text and cloth, reading and assembly as a ritual of radical tenderness.
I draw on existing collective garments, such as Pape’s Divisor or Nicola L.’s Red Coat. My departure from their acts of motion and public visibility is towards a stillness in togetherness, without demanding sameness.

Dance No.3
by Hery Buana Tanjung and Valentina Ambarwati
Dance No. 3 is an interdisciplinary work that brings together traditional dance and sound. A collaboration between artist Hery Kristian Buana Tanjung and dancer Valentina Ambarwati, whose practice is rooted in Javanese classical dance and folk traditions such as Jathilan (Kuda Lumping), the work investigates the relationship between embodied heritage and contemporary modes of perception.

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In this exhibition, the artists turn their lenses inward, transitioning from simulating the external world to expressing their inner consciousness. Departing from traditional academic conventions, they dismantle familiar formal structures to boldly confront the psychological and social pressures of the modern metropolis. The artworks reveal distinct psychological responses to our era: seeking quiet refuge in minimalist abstraction, expressing fracture through distorted deconstruction, and delving into the deep unconscious realms of memory and loneliness. Driven by a spirit of risk-taking, these 15 voices reflect the existential conflicts of our time. Ultimately, Invisible Reflection places the viewer in an active state of self-discovery, proving that art does not merely save reality, but rather saves the way we confront ourselves.

The Artist:
Đinh Trang, Huy Phan, Kim Ngân, Lê Trang Nhung, Lưu Ngọc Diệp, Nguyễn Bách, Nguyễn Bùi Khôi Dung, Nguyễn Xuân Nghi, Phạm Phương, Thuấn Nguyễn, Trần Hạnh, Trần Két, Trần Minh Kim Thoại, Trương Thế Linh, Võ Huỳnh Châu Trinh.

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Abandoned, Practiced Again [Storage Bodies]: Looking Forward by Looking Backward and Inward

curated by Thuy-Tien Vo (Ba Rọi (Bacon) Collective)
with artists:
Lap-Xuan Do Nguyen
Nhi Le
Hoang-Vu Nguyen
and Thuy-Tien Vo

A devised performance gathering four returns as possible ways a body finds out whether a hushed practice still takes urgent root when recalled into use. Four artists in one room, unforgetting what had gone quiet.

Playwright Hoang-Vu Nguyen once kept a ledger of what-if premises, whole worlds un-made. Back in an industry that often puts realism on a pedestal, even commercial science fiction began to feel like a miracle out of reach, a fiction twice removed. He voices his doubt out loud, and hands it to us: each participant becomes his projector, his memory-drive, his paper-shredder, receiving an unrealised story just long enough to help him to tell them all at once, then close them all at once.

Sculpturer, performance artist Lap-Xuan Do-Nguyen returns to her grandfather's notebook, found ten years ago, a devotion recorded plainly in his own hand. She sculpts a place to disappear into, and stays there with what he left, unsure if she is re-reading his words or re-doing his days, the difference between reading and repeating worn thin as old paper.

Performance artist Nhi Le returns to a sequence her body already holds, unchanged, an old ache for her own flesh, xót thân, that she has not yet lên tiếng ngờ vực. Underneath it sits a single dead end: whether an identity can be built from every small alley of ambiguity that was never walked all the way through, never reconciled, held together only by having been passed through once already.

Thuy-Tien Vo, the artist-curator and a poet, as she herself remembers, returns to a body of poetry that has been oversaturated and then withdrawn from, wondering if such lines can survive. Therefore, she creates a performance as a site for meeting, regardless of whether humans/objects/non-human non-objects choose to come.

Between returns, artists respond to one another in precise score, following Matthew Goulish's practice of exact, structured reply to a specific fragment of another's work. The program builds the collaborative architecture that lets that activation happen in public, artists sharing one room and one timeslot, not to agree on a theme but to generate, through proximity, an individualised experience that encourages creative cross-pollination between practices with no reason to otherwise meet.

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Architecture is often understood as the creation of buildings. Yet its deeper purpose is to shape how we live, connect, heal and imagine our future. This interactive workshop and conversation invites participants into KAZE Interior Design Studio to explore architecture as a living process rather than a finished object.

Through stories from hospitality, residential and cultural projects across Vietnam, participants will discover how design evolves through dialogue between people, nature, culture and place. Rather than presenting architecture as a collection of images, the session reveals the thinking, questioning and experimentation that transforms ideas into meaningful spaces.

Participants will be encouraged to discuss how the built environment influences everyday rituals, emotional wellbeing, community and our relationship with the natural world. The conversation will also explore how Vietnamese creativity can respond to global challenges while remaining rooted in local identity and craftsmanship.

Hosted within an active design studio, the event offers visitors a rare opportunity to experience the creative process from the inside. By bringing together designers, students, creatives and the public, the session embodies the spirit of the Living Festival—where creativity is not a finished product, but a living exchange that continues to evolve through participation, conversation and shared experience.

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At DirtyPaws, we believe creativity doesn’t begin when we sit down to brainstorm. It begins much earlier - in the way we live, observe, wander, read, feel and stay curious about the world around us.
A trail, a tree in the garden, a book left on a shelf, or a small detail in everyday life can become the spark for an idea.
Through the making of VFCD’s visual identity, this sharing explores how we collect these everyday observations, turn them into perspectives, and shape them into a visual language - sharing not only the creative process behind the work, but also the creative philosophy that guides how DirtyPaws looks at ideas.