Phi Nguyen- "Liquid Montage: People, Waters, and Memories in Postcolonial Huế"

Liquid Montage traces the deteriorating water-land dynamics of Huế, the postcolonial Vietnamese city that has played multiple roles: Vietnam’s former capital, a French protectorate, and a borderland and battleground from the fourteenth century until the recent Second Indochina War. This book project documents the everyday placemaking practices of Huế’s historically displaced communities amidst these socio-political changes through what I call mnemonic sites—spaces often marginalized in official histories yet crucial for communal memory and identity. Liquid Montage advocates for a nuanced understanding of the urban fabric and its conservation, revealing how these practices are deeply intertwined with daily life and firmly rooted in the territorial context. Inspired by Walter Benjamin’s montage method, the book analyzes Huế’s marginalized urban remnants—largely overlooked in mainstream heritage dialogues but actively lived by the communities. It employs architectural typology and urban morphology analysis, alongside multiscalar architectural drawings, photo collages, and maps, to examine a broad range of archival materials and field data. The book details how humans and nonhuman agents—such as rivers, mountains, and spiritual entities—coexist and shape daily life, rituals, and cultural landscapes. By presenting this situated knowledge, Liquid Montage challenges reductive interpretations and binary frameworks commonly imposed on postcolonial cities in urbanism and heritage studies, such as East-West, colonizer-colonized, tangible-intangible, and nature-culture, thereby enriching our understanding of these complex spaces. Consequently, it promotes a territorial turn and embraces the city-territory concept, emphasizing the profound ecological interconnections within urban networks.

Bio
Phi Nguyen is currently a postdoc fellow at Yale's Council on Southeast Asian Studies where she is developing her first book project Liquid Montage: People, Waters, and Memories in Postcolonial Huế. As a practicing architect and urban researcher, Phi specializes in the intersections of urbanization, migration, top-down heritagization, and local placemaking in postcolonial cities using an interdisciplinary approach. Her current work is supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation. By focusing on lesser-known and contested spaces in postcolonial cities, Phi’s research challenges prevailing global heritage designation standards and amplifies the silenced voices of displaced communities amid socio-political changes. Phi recently completed her PhD in Urbanism at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland, where she also served as a teaching fellow at the Geneva School of Art and Design. Phi holds a Master's in Architecture from Harvard's Graduate School of Design and co-founded the architectural firm Atelier NgNg, whose projects in Vietnam and the U.S. have been published internationally. She led the research and exhibition project "về Huế," spotlighting the city's unheralded heritage sites, with support from the Graham Foundation.