Saigon ↔ Melbourne: Sonic Street Food Banquets

Sonic Street Food Banquets comes to Melbourne Design Week with a trans-urban twist. We travel to Saigon to record the living acoustics of its street food ecosystems — sizzling woks, clinking bowls, motorbike symphonies, sidewalk chatter, laughter, bargaining, steam and flame. These sonic fragments are brought back to Melbourne and remixed into an immersive listening banquet.

A psychogeography combining the sound and taste of two cities! A derive – repeated three times - that brings the sounds of Saigon food culture to the streets and parks of Footscray!

Participants gather to share 3x locally sourced Vietnamese street food while listening to the layered soundscapes of Saigon through live spatial audio. Eating becomes listening. Listening becomes travelling. The city folds into the city.

This inter-city dialogue explores how food choreographs social life — how it structures intimacy, labour, rhythm, memory, feeling, community, migration and the city itself. What feels different? What resonates? What translates across oceans? Through sound, taste and conversation, the banquet becomes a temporary commons: a space to sense cultural difference, unexpected continuity and novel ideas.

Lo-fi, nomadic and intimate, the event transforms everyday consumption into collective inquiry. Disposable containers become ritual objects. Street noise becomes composition. Melbourne meets Saigon in a shared acoustic table.

Free food. We pay. Come hungry. Come curious.

* Sonic Street Lo-Fi Banquets are Oliver Vodeb and Jordan Lacey School of Design RMIT. Both are artists/design researchers doing extensive work in Saigon. The project will support local Vietnamese businesses in Footscray.

We will meet at the Saigon Welcome Arch in Footscray cnr. Leeds and Hopkins street.

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Host or Publisher RMIT