Elegies in Urban Decay

Elegies in Urban Decay investigates how analog photography can visualise the affective and ecological residues of “lost futures” in rapidly transforming Southeast-Asian cities. Drawing on Fisher’s hauntology, Thacker’s cosmic pessimism and Morton’s dark ecology, it asks: How can obsolete photographic technologies render the spectral traces of unfulfilled modernities embedded in Saigon’s urban fabric?

The project comprises ten analogue photographs captured in Ho Chi Minh City on redscale 35 mm, 120 mm and 110 mm film. Instability in colour, deliberate under-exposure and the often use of expired stock create visual entropy and melancholic stillness. Construction sites, derelict cinemas and overgrown riverbanks become poetic elegies that foreground ecological anxiety and temporal disjunction. By fusing experimental film practice with hauntological theory in a non-Western metropolis, the series offers a new method for articulating affective urbanism through material obsolescence.

The portfolio was accepted through a competitive, peer-reviewed selection for exhibition at the VNxDesign Forum (Ho Chi Minh City, 4–6 July 2025), a regionally recognised platform for design-led research. This recognition affirms the work’s scholarly merit and situates it within debates on creative practice, ecological aesthetics and post-development urban studies. The series advances disciplinary conversations by providing a transferable visual methodology for examining ecological estrangement and cultural memory in other rapidly urbanising contexts.