The ‘Saigon’s Portrait’ project displays one of the truest and rawest forms of the city: films and community videos. It consists of three events:
1/ Collecting footage - Gom Vid gathers ordinary videos through community donation to display the complexity and systems in daily city lives. The video collection happens online through an archive website, creating for the museum a unique online video display of ordinary life in Ho Chi Minh city.
2/ Editing and compiling footage - Sửa Vid is a video editing contest using the collected footage from the event above with the theme ‘The portrait of Ho Chi Minh City'.
3/ Showcasing the video collection - Chiếu Vid is a screening event that use buildings as canvases to display the winning videos from the editing contest along with the curated footage by the community from the video collection.
This series of events creates a unique online archive for the museum as well as forms a new showcase section for films and videos with up-to-date information. Moreover, the project helps uncover the “ordinary-extraordinary” in the city through community footage that is always there but ignored. We are accustomed to the chaotically organized structures of Ho Chi Minh city; ‘Saigon’s Portrait’ allows the museum to transmit a shared love for filmmaking. Inspirational and inclusive, it demonstrates that creativity has no boundary, and can come from the materials of everyday life.
- Bùi Lục Thảo Mai
ABOUT THE COLLABORATION
“In what ways can this museum develop new forms of cooperation and exchange with the different communities that, together today, form the evolving face of Ho Chi Minh City?”
The work exhibited at the museum responds, creatively and speculatively, to that question. 26 students at RMIT University developed their answers in the fall and winter of 2020, during a three-month “Capstone Studio”, part of the final year of the Design Studies program.
A TRUSTED COLLABORATION
The current show is the continuation of a collaboration that began in 2019 with a student proposal for the modernization of an important museum exhibition space. The museum offers our students exceptional and meaningful design opportunities. Our collaboration is an important part of the continuing commitment, in Design Studies, to engage in rich conversations about design in Vietnam with leading local, regional and national partners.
- Andrew Stiff / Kenneth Rabin
Lecturers in Design
