Saigon ↔ Melbourne: Sonic Street Food Banquets

What happens when the sound of Saigon’s street food culture meets the taste of Vietnamese Melbourne?

Sonic Street Food Banquets draws on field recordings of Saigon’s street food ecosystems — sizzling woks, clinking bowls, motorbike symphonies, sidewalk chatter, laughter, bargaining, steam and flame. These sonic fragments are brought back to Melbourne/Naarm and remixed into an immersive listening banquet.

A psychogeographic approach combines the sound and taste of two cities through a dérive — repeated three times — bringing the sounds of Saigon’s food culture to the streets and parks of Footscray.

Participants gather to share three locally sourced Vietnamese street food dishes while listening to 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. It asks what feels different, what resonates and what translates across oceans. Through sound, taste and conversation, the banquet becomes a temporary commons: a space to sense cultural difference, unexpected continuity and new ideas.

Lo-fi, nomadic and intimate, the event transforms everyday consumption into collective inquiry. Disposable containers become ritual objects. Street noise becomes composition.

Sonic Street Lo-Fi Banquets is a project by Oliver Vodeb and Jordan Lacey, School of Design, RMIT. Both are artists and design researchers whose work engages extensively with Saigon. The project supports local Vietnamese businesses in Footscray.

This is a free event, but bookings are essential.

Meet at the Saigon Welcome Arch in Footscray, cnr. Leeds and Hopkins Street.