by
chef-photographer
&
Atelier S P A C E HCMC Autumn 2020
Art Director
***
an online exhibition
in S P A C E
opening reception
by invitation
Monday 5 July 2021
9pm USEST
***
to request an invitation
join mailing list
thank you
Images: by Văn Trần, September & October 2020, Saigon
Today we share a story that will be published in a July issue of S P A C E. ‘Ready for Anything’ was written by Anonymous in response to a prompt that was part of our May series of ‘Papers’. ‘Papers’ took place over email and in asynchronous, international conversation threads. Anonymous, author of the below, wrote the following in reply to a prompt called ‘Arrivals.’ With permission, we publish it here for you..
For those interested in finding out more about what sorts of personal ideas that list might include, Anonymous recommends several courses if you are inclined to teach yourself how to do things, and learn online, because everything is ‘just there.’ For those interested in teaching themselves things online, for free, Anonymous suggests this site called ‘online courses club’. Interesting! More soon, about DK’s new project, an online gallery. Watch this… S P A C E.
A lot of conversations happen at an ‘N’ and this time was no different. We are ready to share, meaningfully and not trivially, in the online follow-up sessions. They’ll be virtual so our ‘N’ guests from ‘N’ HCMC, which *happened* in the magic way only ‘N’ can, can see and discover others in our S P A C E programs, as we network, together, one designful moment at a time. It’s been fun, HCMC ! Thank you.
So many things are happening simultaneously that it’s hard to feel the feelings, see the things that need to be seen, and make the decisions, or watch them happen.
So I understand, from ambiently and osmosis-ically?, I like making up words sometimes, haha, so I understand from being here and observing, day after day, morning after morning, the churn and whirr of the routines in this neighborhood. District 3, in HCMC. I’m in Vietnam. This is turning into the [deleted]. But many, I’m sure, are doing this same thing.
Not sure what’s going to come, and not being able to plan are things people are sharing with each other. I know. It’s not like I’m really eavesdropping but I can kinda tell. Maybe it’s the 27 countries I’ve visited and spent bunches of time in, including the seven years and counting in Southeast Asia, to date. Um. Long story I could launch into here, but that’s not really pertinent.
Uncertainty is like… being a fish on the chopping board.
Start liking seafood and fish sauce… is what someone on the /vietnam subreddit wrote. I. Think. That’s. Good advice.
More to share, but not now. I want to give our new acquaintance time to find the way back to emailing with me about the things ahead. I am thinking about starting an inbound tourism company, too, by the way. I can. I have some ideas. I even have some osmosis-experience.
Lol. I’m just trying to cheer you up, O.
I met O. over a conversation that started with a thing about me having to fork over USD 990.
Good thing I have… a job? Wait. I don’t have one of those. I have DK. DK is where I am. Existing.
‘Cá nằm trên thớt’
We’re gonna talk about it, O. When your’e ready.
If you want.
Let’s see.
This is the week we host ‘N’ in HCMC!
And it’s also where we found out quite a bit about… who we each are, individually, too.
To those who received the invitation, checkit.
‘N’ is like nothing else.
update: 29 December 2020
Here’s a quick update with some more information that we gathered via email in a conversation with Beck, one of the three coordinators of the Festival of the Photocopier. The three coordinators and twelve volunteers together make this program. Beck told us about the history with the festival and the way it grew. ‘I started visiting Sticky in high school, back in 2002, and when I hit university there was an opening in the volunteer line-up, so I’ve been with Sticky for about 12 years, since 2008!’
A. Spaice: What’s cool about the festival, to you?
Beck: The cool thing about FotP is that the growth has been very organic. Every year we offer the same thing – a free table to sell your zines on – and people come and they sell their zines and make some friends and have a nice time. So the next year when the fair rolls around again, those seasoned individuals want to come back which means we have to add on some new tables for people who have never been a part of the fair before. The community has really made the event what it is, 2020 was our 10th FotP, if no one wanted to come to the zine fair it wouldn’t be a two-day event held across two huge rooms. 2021 FotP will be our first online zine fair so it will be a different kind of fair, but we’re hoping people are as into it as the IRL fair.
A. Spaice: Any opportunities you foresee?
Beck: I think being able to open up the fair to zinesters globally, in a realistic way, has been a really nice side-effect. Normally we’re happy to take applications from people from outside of Melbourne if they’re happy to travel, but travelling from Adelaide or Perth to Melbourne is way more affordable than traveling from New Zealand or Japan.
The further away you are from Melbourne the more expensive that trip gets, so it’s unrealistic to expect people to spend thousands of dollars to attend a two-day event to sell a $2 zine. If they want to, and can afford to make that trip, then we’re extremely happy to have them, but it’s not feasible for a lot of people.
We’re seeing a couple of names we don’t recognise submit applications, so I think we might be getting a few more international entries.
A. Spaice: Yes! That was our situation, exactly! When we applied from Cambodia. I seriously thought about going there [in February 2020] but ike you said, a $2 zine doesn’t cover the cost of flights, and staying there.
Beck: We were glad to hear that you were able to find someone to table for you…! But yeah, we totally get the financial side of it. We get invites from interstate fairs and often it’s a matter of who is available to go and also can afford to? We’re all really aware that you aren’t really making money with zines, you make zines for the love of it, not to turn a huge profit.
So sometimes you can make a go of an out of town zine fair and sometimes you can’t, the good news for Australians is that there are more and more zine fairs popping up all over.
A. Spaice: And… Covid?
Beck: There was no resistance to making the FotP digital in 2021 because of the pandemic situation. As I’m sure you would have seen in the news, Melbourne has been through a pretty intense lockdown this year because of COVID-19, so for us it wasn’t really something that needed to be debated.
Our top priority is the health and safety of our community, so moving the fair online seemed like the best way to keep FotP alive and not have to cancel it or push it back to an undetermined point in the future.
Moving the fair online will also make it more accessible to people who might not have been able to make it down to the physical fair, so in a way it’s allowed us to open up applications to people= who wouldn’t otherwise have been able to participate.
We start planning FotP around September normally, so this year we were doing that while we were still in the hard lockdown here in Melbourne.
With the way things were changing for us at that time, we weren’t sure if we could legally have a 500-person indoor event in February. Even if we could have it, we didn’t know if our state borders would be open, or if the transmission in the community would still be in such a way that no one would want to risk the chance of exposure to come. The good news is that the lockdown worked and Melbourne is well on the way back to regular programming. But we know this isn’t the case everywhere, and that we could hit a third wave and go back into heavy restrictions if something were to go wrong.
It also means that people with physical or health restrictions are able to attend as well as people who are located interstate or overseas who can’t travel.
FotP is the largest zine fair in the southern hemisphere, and while it’s always free to table at the fair we know that if you’re traveling to Melbourne you’ve got those associated costs to cover while you’re in town. fotp.online is removing those costs for a lot of people so they can attend without having to worry about travel and accommodation and everything that goes with it.
Success, for us, would be to see people excited about the digital fair, come to the virtual events we have planned, and return to the site throughout the year to keep checking back in on artists they were interested in!
A. Spaice: Does it cost ?
Beck: The online nature of the event means that it’s literally cost-free for people to sign up from other locations now, so we’re hoping to see a few applications from people a little further out than usual.
All you need to do is visit www.fotp.online to apply!
A. Spaice: Thank you for the time you’ve taken to help us learn more. Is there anything else you’d like to add before we close?
Beck: How do we pay for the fair? We get funding from the City of Melbourne! We were just approved for a two year grant, starting 2021, via the City of Melbourne’s Arts Creative Investment Partnerships so we are both appreciative and grateful to them for their support of us and zine culture!!
A. Spaice: Great! Thanks !!
//
We just got this really cool piece of news. The Festival of the Photocopier, which is run by the Melbourne group Sticky Institute, will be online in 2021.
DK had participated in this festival in 2020, which was a cool moment for us as it was our debut with S P A C E in real life. We’ve since also been at the San Francisco Zine Festival, which took place in September of this year, as it was virtual. Was cool. HT MB.
Now, we just learned, Festival of the Photocopier 2021, will be virtual.
So I wanted to let you know about this, because anyone anywhere can join for next time. Very excited about this.
I just submitted my application–sent!
Here’s my idea, for if we are accepted. I am going to angle the next few issues of S P A C E’s December collection, ‘Trust’, to an international audience. Of course they will be co-created with our friends and guests in Atelier S P A C E popups here in HCMC, so look out for some cool new bilingual issues to share in real life here, and also, hopefully, on the virtual international stage at FOTP 2021.
Excited!
So, our agenda for December is this..
I’m excited about the potential to launch the Atelier S P A C E // HCMC creations at the Festival of the Photocopier in Melbourne next year. Hopefully we’ll get ‘in’ and get to put on a great exhibit for people to see just how unique a hyperlocal perspective on ‘art from Vietnam’ can really look. [Aside: Ask us about ‘decolonization sometime!’. No, wait, ask AD! A zine about that, being art directed by AD, a member of ‘Papers‘.]
Cool.
Here is a pic of our Phnom Penh reading from issues of S P A C E. I hosted this on the same day as our debut at the Festival of the Photocopier 2020:
Memories!… <3
And here’s the bit about how you can apply to be in the Festival of the Photocopier in 2021…..
Apply for the Festival of the Photocopier! It’s free to apply, so I just wanted to share this with those out there who might be wondering if they qualify. If you make zines, you qualify, is my understanding. Here, I’ll just paste in what I got in the email from Sticky Institute earlier this week…
Our digital fair will be hosted at http://www.fotp.online and applications are currently open for stallholders … facilitated by Sticky Institute!!!
As this is a digital fair, applications are open to zinesters located anywhere in the world. If you have a pen pal located outside of Australia, feel free to forward them the link so they can apply! There is no cost to have a digital stall on fotp.online and the website will be live for at least a year.
…This has been a bit of a spiel but we’d really love for you to check out fotp.online and submit an application to be a stallholder or join FotP-Swap!. Applications will close on the 10th of January, 2021 and we don’t want anyone to miss out!
We know this is going to be a very different kind of zine fair but we’re hoping you’ll be there with us, on the other side of the screen!
Stay safe,
Sticky
Another ‘N’.
Is getting designed. It will take place this month. It will happen in HCMC.
I’ve sent, by now, more than 20 invitations here and there through the internet to people and most of those, of course, have gone unanswered. Though there is always the magic of the follow-up note, I’ve found, in my past explorations in hosting ‘N’ in other cities. Phnom Penh, to start, and then London, Copenhagen, Bangkok, Hanoi.
‘N’ is your masterpiece, DK
-AM, 2017, Phnom Penh
‘N’, an invitation, is here, if you are curious. I’m always open to hearing from people who just simply find out about it and get in touch. Cool! That’s what I do! So yeah. Most welcome to initiate a conversation with us, if you like what you see at the link.
You try it, you find out what works, what doesn’t. You adjust and adapt the next set of things so that you optimize for what you want. In the case of ‘N,’ right from the start, I was designing for: making it happen. Who has time to send 67 emails trying to meet for coffee? Not me. So I just invited 16 people to meet at the same time and at the same place so they could all have the guesswork and admin time neatly removed from their lives and simply show up for a party. That. Was. The idea. And it still is, six years later.
If you have already been in touch with DK about this, at some point in the months of September or October, when we hosted our small four-person meet ups, then you can come to this one and see what you missed. If you got an invitation, and were wondering, here is your second-chance. I don’t usually do that, but due to covid, 16N has been recast as a series of mini-parties instead of the giant ‘big blind date for 16 people’ that it used to be. Still and all, I’m curious to see what will happen when we do this, again, this month. Some are registering. Some are going to be there. Will we see you? Let’s find out. Email us back if you got the invitation, or just go through the links from the invitation page.
The page is here: http://designkompany.com/16n
Let us know.
‘Tell me more, DK.’
‘What do you want to know?’
‘Like, what would be the hashtags?’
‘#whynot #sayyes #play16n.’
A members-only issue, this time.
S P A C E | Mito, ‘Shibui.’
Here’s a link.
http://gum.co/space-mito-shibui
Thanks.
HT E. Happy Birthday.
Wikipedia has a lot to say. The source of the following is from this link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibui
Định nghĩa shibui hoặc shibusa
Definition of shibui or shibusa
Bảy yếu tố của shibusa là
sự giản lược (simplicity)
sự tuyệt đối (implicity)
sự khiêm tốn (modesty)
sự im lặng (silence)
tính tự nhiên (naturalness)
tính đều đặn (everydayness) và
sự không hoàn hảo (imperfection)
Sự giản lược quý phái của shibusa là sự biểu hiện tinh tế về bản chất của các yếu tố trong một trải nghiệm thẩm mỹ mang tới sự tĩnh lặng. Sự quý phái khiêm nhường là điều hiển nhiên trong sự thanh thản u buồn với một chút lấp lánh.
Như các thuật ngữ mỹ học Nhật Bản khác, iki và wabi-sabi, shibui có thể áp dụng cho nhiều đối tượng, không chỉ là nghệ thuật hay thời trang.
Shibui (渋い) (tính từ), shibumi (渋み) (danh từ), hoặc shibusa (渋さ) (danh từ) là những từ tiếng Nhật chỉ một khái niệm mỹ học đặc biệt về vẻ đẹp giản dị, tinh tế và không phô trương.
Shibusa là một sự xuất hiện hoặc trải nghiệm được làm phong phú lên (enriched), được làm dịu đi (subdued) của phẩm cách tốt về mặt bản chất với cơ cấu về hình thức, liên kết và nỗ lực, mang đến một sự tĩnh lặng vô tận.
Màu sắc của shibusa là những màu “lờ mờ” (muddy). Ví dụ, trong thiết kế và sơn nội thất, màu xám được thêm vào những gam màu chính để tạo một hiệu ứng ánh bạc, mà gắn các màu sắc khác nhau lại với nhau thành một sự sắp đặt phối hợp. Tuỳ thuộc vào mức độ của màu xám được thêm vào, màu sắc của shibui trải dài từ những màu pastel tới tối. Thỉnh thoảng, một mảng màu sắc tươi sáng được thêm vào để tạo một điểm nổi bật.
DK wrote about startup culture a few months ago, when we got to Ho Chi Minh City, after five months hiding out in Dalat wondering, ‘when this is going to be over.’ Well! [deleted] Then, DK decided it. We’d try to make a go of something, in HCMC.
The thinking went like this: perhaps some of us could build something new in HCMC. A big city. A lot of opportunity. Plenty of inquisitive young people. (It’s been a mixed bag, to be honest. More about that, in today’s email for members of Atelier S P A C E. Membership info is here.)
It’s inspired by something I found today…
I read today in the Vietnamese Express News this headline: ‘Startups need partnerships to participate in bigger ecosystems.’
Writes Dat Nguyen:
Vietnamese startups need to expand their partnership network with domestic and regional firms for functioning deeper in big firms’ ecosystems, industry insiders say.
Well, yes.
More in the email I’ll send today at 7AM USEST, for members of Atelier S P A C E. Membership info is at our crowdfunding page, here’s a link. Thanks.
Ladies and gentlemen, this week, I give you… S P A C E | HCMC, ‘Computer Says No.’
Thanks!
DK
Qualitative sciences are curious, sometimes. I found something written by Philip Kitcher in his book, The Lives to Come. Not saying that you should read the book, it wasn’t that interesting, but this part was very curious to me. I’ll paraphrase.
The author lists three ways, according to him, that one can evaluate if someone else’s life was ‘with quality’, or not. Why should we listen to him? I’m not sure. I’m not writing newspaper stories these days, just blogging what I wants o I will just say, ‘maybe you can decide if you think the below is interesting and take or leave it.’ I have had it kicking around in ‘draft’ here, for three years.
Let me just tell you these criteria, according to the author.
To paraphrase, they are:
MASSIVE QUESTIONS, to be sure. What do you think about the above? Would you agree or disagree with Kitcher’s three-point list of what makes for a quality life? Would you add something, and if so, what would it be? If you could eliminate something, what would you take away?
These are the kinds of things that we talk about, in ‘Papers‘.
A members-only issue.
S P A C E | Saigon ‘The Book of Feelings: Part I’.
So many things to say. Quietly, in the safety of a carefully held S P A C E.
http://gum.co/space-saigon-bof
Thanks!
DK
By request, we’re bringing back the 2018 online short course for photographers who love to write. It’s called ‘Slow Moment.’ Max of 4 participants. Application required. Selected candidates will be invited to register. Free for six-months-and-counting members of S P A C E.
Here are the details…
https://designkompany.com/atelier/20-nov-short-course-slow-moment/
