Vietnamese Everyday Works

Arturo Escobar argues that “designs from the south were always there, albeit with other names, we are just starting to perceive them. It takes time to recognize them.”¹ Yet because design remains deeply tied to a modern Western epistemology, he asks: “Why use the word design at all, especially for nonmodern contexts?”² This question invites us to consider whether practices of making, repairing, cultivating, and worldmaking that emerge outside Western modernity should be understood through the language of design, or whether doing so risks subsuming them within the very framework that has historically marginalized them.

Within Eurocentric frameworks, few distinctions are made to recognize non-Western singularities. As Stuart Hall points out, “vis-à-vis the developed West, we are very much ‘the same.’ We belong to the marginal, the underdeveloped, the periphery, the ‘Other.’ We are at the outer edge, the ‘rim,’ of the metropolitan world, always ‘South’ to someone else’s El Norte.”³ Rather than treating the margin and the periphery as secondary positions, Việc Nam foregrounds Việt Nam as one among many centers: sites from which objects, practices, forms of knowledge, and their politics can be understood through the worlds that produced them.

Objects are central to this approach because they offer another way of telling history. They carry gestures, routines, materials, economies, and relations within them. When read beyond their apparent function, they reveal how techniques circulate, who uses them, who repairs them, who adapts them, and how they become embedded in everyday life.

For Việc Nam, objects are not collected as isolated artifacts, but as vehicles for stories often absent from dominant histories of design. A knife, a basket, a stool, a lunch box, a street sign, or a tool may appear ordinary, but each one holds traces of use, labor, adaptation, survival, and collective intelligence. These objects make visible forms of knowledge that are practical, embodied, and often unnamed: ways of cutting, carrying, cleaning, cooling, and moving through and making the world. Việc Nam shifts design away from Eurocentric conceptions of rationalization, homogeneity, optimization, disposability, and universal standardization, toward resourcefulness, heterogeneity, multiplicity, adaptation, repair, and situated knowledge.

At the center of this distinction is the question of authorship. The Western design canon tends to privilege the named designer and the claim of origin over the object, while overlooking forms of collective knowledge embedded in repeated gestures, local materials, inherited techniques, repair, adaptation, and everyday use. Việc Nam responds to this hierarchy by treating Vietnamese everyday objects as works of design shaped by many hands, habits, and contexts.

Who gets called a designer? Which objects are archived? Which forms of intelligence are recognized? Which are confined to categories such as craft or folklore? Through their collections and programming, museums shape what the public sees, but also what it does not see.

Erasure is a sovereign action; it decides what and who matters. As Michel-Rolph Trouillot reminds us, “the silencing of the past inheres not only in what is said but also in how it is said.”¹ To archive these objects is therefore to respond to an absence: to gather what has often existed outside institutional recognition, and to value what has long been overlooked. For Việc Nam, archiving does not mean fixing objects as static artifacts. An object is always in motion: through the actions it enables, the gestures it requires, the materials and techniques that bring it into being, and the transformations through which it is repaired, adapted, replaced, or carried into another form. Archiving means recognizing its cultural, social, and political value before it disappears, remains unnamed, or evolves into another form.

Arturo Escobar argues that “designs from the south were always there, albeit with other names, we are just starting to perceive them. It takes time to recognize them.”¹ Yet because design remains deeply tied to a modern Western epistemology, he asks: “Why use the word design at all, especially for nonmodern contexts?”² This question invites us to consider whether practices of making, repairing, cultivating, and worldmaking that emerge outside Western modernity should be understood through the language of design, or whether doing so risks subsuming them within the very framework that has historically marginalized them.

Within Eurocentric frameworks, few distinctions are made to recognize non-Western singularities. As Stuart Hall points out, “vis-à-vis the developed West, we are very much ‘the same.’ We belong to the marginal, the underdeveloped, the periphery, the ‘Other.’ We are at the outer edge, the ‘rim,’ of the metropolitan world, always ‘South’ to someone else’s El Norte.”³ Rather than treating the margin and the periphery as secondary positions, Việc Nam foregrounds Việt Nam as one among many centers: sites from which objects, practices, forms of knowledge, and their politics can be understood through the worlds that produced them.

Objects are central to this approach because they offer another way of telling history. They carry gestures, routines, materials, economies, and relations within them. When read beyond their apparent function, they reveal how techniques circulate, who uses them, who repairs them, who adapts them, and how they become embedded in everyday life.

For Việc Nam, objects are not collected as isolated artifacts, but as vehicles for stories often absent from dominant histories of design. A knife, a basket, a stool, a lunch box, a street sign, or a tool may appear ordinary, but each one holds traces of use, labor, adaptation, survival, and collective intelligence. These objects make visible forms of knowledge that are practical, embodied, and often unnamed: ways of cutting, carrying, cleaning, cooling, and moving through and making the world. Việc Nam shifts design away from Eurocentric conceptions of rationalization, homogeneity, optimization, disposability, and universal standardization, toward resourcefulness, heterogeneity, multiplicity, adaptation, repair, and situated knowledge.