Officine Gặp

Officine Gặp We are an urban lab experimenting with new ways of reading, thinking and making the city

We couldn’t be happier to share a project we have been quietly developing over the past year: the Saigon_Miền Tây Sound ...
21/05/2026

We couldn’t be happier to share a project we have been quietly developing over the past year: the Saigon_Miền Tây Sound Map.

The platform operates through an interactive map where recordings are uploaded, geographically pinned, and organised through categories, descriptions, and location data. Designed as a community-based archive, it allows people to browse, listen to, download, and contribute recordings, gradually building a distributed collection of everyday sonic environments across Ho Chi Minh City and the southern provinces.

The project approaches sound as a way of tracing the changing relations between ecological systems, infrastructures, and everyday life — a growing repository of sounds, memories, and atmospheres connected to Southern Vietnam.

The map has been self-initiated and independently developed, and it is still very much evolving. We warmly invite you to explore the platform, test it, and share feedback so we can continue improving it together.

While currently the map and related public program will focus on the southern provinces, the platform is designed to operate across Vietnam, with the intention of formally expanding it in the near future.

You can access the map here: https://saigon-soundscape.onrender.com

🔉🎧📍✨

A very belated thank you to everyone who joined our recent Archival (Im)materiality reading and conversation with Aylin ...
03/11/2025

A very belated thank you to everyone who joined our recent Archival (Im)materiality reading and conversation with Aylin Derya Stahl and Duc Le, co-hosted with Linh Phamvu.

Our discussion touched on care, erasure, oblivion, and material fragility — and on how to practice forms of attention that make space for what fades, erodes, or resists being fixed. We discussed how we exchange memories, and the tension between how collective memory is constructed through selective histories and mediated images, and how fragile intimacies and personal exchanges offer alternative ways of remembering and constructing narratives.

With deep gratitude to Aylin and Duc for their insights.
See you at the next reading session.

[Tiếng Việt bên dưới]Join us on Sunday, 19th October, for an evening of reading and intimate conversation with Aylin Der...
13/10/2025

[Tiếng Việt bên dưới]

Join us on Sunday, 19th October, for an evening of reading and intimate conversation with Aylin Derya Stahl and Duc Le , contributors to Zine 2: Archival (Im)materiality, part of the series The City Otherwise.

The session continues the dialogue initiated in the second issue, engaging with how archival traces - material and immaterial - unfold narratives of memory, loss, and transformation.

Through her project Fixing on the Verge of Disappearance, Aylin Derya Stahl, a Berlin-based artist working across photography, installation, sound and text, investigates the dissolution of images through processes of decay. Her practice examines how transformation can become a mode of attention that reveals the temporal, spatial and sensory entanglements in material form.

Duc Le, an architect and researcher at CO-NX and founding member of Gian Giữa Collective, examines the entanglements of heritage, modernity, and adaptation in Vietnamese architecture. His ongoing research, Grids of Vietnamese Modernism, looks at the historiography of 20th-century architecture in Vietnam, revealing how material culture and built form hold the shifting narratives of a place in transition.

Together, their works open up conversations on the instability of archives and the atmospheric lives of materials—where memory meets transformation, and the city itself becomes an evolving record.

The conversation will be moderated by Officine Gặp and Linh Phamvu, and is open to the public. We invite you to join, listen, and take part in the discussion during the open Q&A.

EVENT DETAILS
Time: 20:00 — 21:30, Sunday 19/10/2025 (GMT +7)
Location: Online, meeting link will be sent after registration
Registration: https://forms.gle/YJ7sFdVfLLYHVuSn8
Language: English

📸📸Images courtesy of Aylin Derya Stahl and Duc Le

A few glimpses from the launch of The City Otherwise at VNXSymposium.We were truly moved by the level of curiosity and e...
13/07/2025

A few glimpses from the launch of The City Otherwise at VNXSymposium.
We were truly moved by the level of curiosity and engagement from the audience. Looking ahead, we’re excited to continue developing this as a platform for collaborative research and dialogue — both locally and across borders.

A heartfelt thank you to all our contributors Duc Le, Aylin Derya Stahl, Giuseppe De Francesco for your generosity and insight, to Linh Phamvu for being part of the journey every step of the way and to School of Communication & Design - RMIT Vietnam for offering such a great space for exchange and collaboration.

Make sure to download your copy of the first three issues via our Linktree or on our website.

04/07/2025

[Tiếng Việt bên dưới]

The City Otherwise is a curatorial and research-driven zine series. Emerging from long-term fieldwork and collaborations with local practitioners, it brings together interviews, observations, and collective reflections. The zine serves not only as a mode of dissemination but as a generative tool that actively shapes the research process. As such, it proposes a situated methodology for engaging with urban transformation and collective authorship— particularly in contexts where vernacular knowledge, cohabitation, and everyday practices are central to understanding, inhabiting, and negotiating space.

The name "The City Otherwise" suggests a reimagining or alternative reading of the urban landscape—one that challenges dominant perspectives, practices, or narratives. It's a way of asking: What if we understood, inhabited, or designed the city differently?

Presented as part of ResearchX: Mapping Future Heritages – Spatial Studies in Ho Chi Minh City during VNxSymposium, The City Otherwise contributes a process-driven perspective to the forum’s broader inquiry into spatial practices. Through themes of narrowness, memory, and observation, the first three issues reflect on how places are continuously made and remade—socially, politically, and culturally—across time and scale. In this context, the zine becomes a space for speculation and resistance, foregrounding small, situated practices as active agents in shaping the city’s evolving urban imaginaries and socio-spatial narratives.

Texts by: Afra Rebuscini, Yuri Frassi, Linh Phamvu, Duc Le, Aylin Derya Stahl, Giuseppe De Francesco
And a conversation with 12 architecture studios across Vietnam

Developed in collaboration with Linh Phamvu

📚 You can find The City Otherwise zines during VNxSYMPOSIUM at Nina Next Space, 180/1 Nguyễn Tất Thành, District 4, HCMC — from from 4 to 6 July. You can also access the online version through our Linktree or website.

There are moments when architecture becomes a visceral experience — a fleeting atmosphere, a backdrop where encounters u...
30/05/2025

There are moments when architecture becomes a visceral experience — a fleeting atmosphere, a backdrop where encounters unfold.
We felt this deeply during our most recent GẶP session with G+architects, held at the Gia Định House.

The Gia Định House stands as a quiet reminder of the power of small gestures in architecture and their ability to shape how people live and feel in a space. It’s a building that responds to its context rather than resisting it — one that embraces the conditions of its place with care and thoughtfulness.

Thank you, Giang Doan, for your humility and gentle clarity in sharing the design process with us.

A heartfelt thank you to everyone who took part in the Counter Gestures: Drifting, Marking, Echoing workshop, and to Ayl...
22/05/2025

A heartfelt thank you to everyone who took part in the Counter Gestures: Drifting, Marking, Echoing workshop, and to Aylin Derya Stahl for generously sharing her insights into her research process and her exploration of blue images in urban environments.

Through walking, light-sensitive techniques, and working with found materials, we collectively explored the city’s “subconscious”—the subtle imprints of its past, present, and imagined futures, revealed through everyday encounters. Building on Aylin’s ongoing research into the transformation and degradation of images in urban contexts, participants engaged critically with the material and immaterial layers of a specific area in Saigon.

Your contributions are essential in helping us investigate new ways of recording, sensing, and interpreting our urban surroundings.

The Gặp Series is back — and this time with a site visit!This edition takes us to Gia Dinh House, a newly completed proj...
13/05/2025

The Gặp Series is back — and this time with a site visit!
This edition takes us to Gia Dinh House, a newly completed project by G+architects

“Gia Dinh House is a multifunctional residence that explores the potential of interwoven voids. Instead of treating the sloped terrain and irregular plot as constraints, we saw them as opportunities — a starting point for rethinking structure and embracing spatial difference. The site’s challenges and diverse program became the framework to imagine a new architectural logic.”— KTS Đoàn Bằng Giang, founding architect of G+

We’ll be guided through the house by Giang himself, who will share insights into the design process and the stories behind the project.

🧭 The visit is limited to 8 participants — first come, first served.📩 To join, message us via Facebook or Instagram to secure your spot.

Cities exist in a constant tension between what is designed and built, and what is imagined, felt, and inhabited. As Ita...
09/05/2025

Cities exist in a constant tension between what is designed and built, and what is imagined, felt, and inhabited. As Italo Calvino writes, “with cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed.” Cities are repositories of collective memory, containers of aspiration, and stages for imagined futures.

Counter Gestures: Drifting, Marking, Echoing is a workshop that invites participants to explore the city not only as a physical environment but as a layered space of urban imaginaries—constantly reshaped by dreams, expectations, and subtle negotiations of identity and belonging.

The workshop stems from the ongoing research project Fixing on the Verge of Disappearance by Berlin-based artist Aylin Derya Stahl, which traces the life cycles of images in urban spaces, especially those that have degraded or transformed through light, weather, and time. Building on this research, the workshop invites participants to critically engage with Saigon and its (im)material layers through wandering, observing, listening, and working with light-sensitive materials.
Using walking as a performative tool for research and an act of creating and imagining space, combined with the cyanotype process as a method to engage with presence and traces, participants will explore the city’s “subconscious”: the subtle imprints of longing, memory, and potential futures embedded in everyday encounters. Through this hands-on approach, participants will explore how images emerge through exposure and environment, reflecting on visibility, presence, and material change.

Led by artist Aylin Derya Stahl in collaboration with Officine Gặp, the workshop becomes a space for collaborative reflection—rethinking how we sense, record, and interpret our urban environments.

Please join us!
📍 Location: Gieng Cafe — Lô D3, CC 1A1B Nguyễn Đình Chiểu, Q1 (Căn 003)

🅿️ Parking: CC A3

📅 Date: Friday, 16 May 2025

⏰ Time: 9:30 AM – 12:30 PM

💬 Language: English

🎟 Fee: Free of charge — just grab a coffee at Gieng Cafe while you’re with us!

🔗 Reserve your spot: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfVE6FwBQpeWC4z9B3pcqtsf_GrNGUP-CMAKDtFOW3nCxiSQQ/viewform?usp=sharing

Thank you for spending some time with us and contributing to the Saigon Sound Archive.See you soon for the next session!...
09/04/2025

Thank you for spending some time with us and contributing to the Saigon Sound Archive.

See you soon for the next session! 🎧🖤

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