Ho Chi Minh City abstracted: a creative exploration of the urban vernacular

This project has explored new visual narratives of the city. It began by observing the city on a micro-scale and then using the findings as tools for new urban creations. The core objective is to visually capture the city's uniqueness and dissect its anatomy. This is achieved by means of its de- and re-construction and by its narration via an illustrated artefact. By dissecting and cataloging images of the urban space, we reflect on its nature and composition, discovering hidden qualities that appear through this process. These qualities are directly linked to the city's inhabitants who have created the landscape. The collages of a new metropolitan catalogue are the media to categorize the city's components, trying to make sense of them by experimenting with different visual narrative formats. The idea is to analyze the street's elements at a range of scales, textures, colours and temporalities through the study of the media itself as a spatial phenomenon. Using Ho Chi Minh's alleys as a case study, this project is an artistic contribution to their narrative and a commemoration of their disappearing vernacular elements through a visual output. This research investigates the alternatives of Ho Chi Minh City's visual representation and to create other types of spatial knowledge and formats. The methodologies applied can be extrapolated to other urban realities.