Trần Thị Thu Trang is an independent researcher, anthropologist, curator, and interdisciplinary collaborator based between Vietnam and Germany. Her work explores memory, food practices, diasporic identity, decolonial cultural production, and contemporary community development through anthropological research and collaborative artistic practice. She works across curatorial, social, and research-based formats that create spaces for intersectional dialogue, collective exchange, and affective forms of knowledge production.

She is currently developing XOAY in Hanoi, a hybrid cultural café and community space that brings together art, hospitality, research, and contemporary cultural practice.

Trần Thị Thu Trang's work is situated between anthropology, artistic research, curatorial practice, and community-based cultural work. She is particularly interested in affective forms of knowledge, diasporic identity, decolonial practices, collective memory, and contemporary community development. Through both research and curatorial work, she explores how everyday practices such as food sharing, hospitality, ritual, and communal gathering create emotional infrastructures of care, belonging, and cultural continuity. A central aspect of her work examines how communities negotiate identity and social connection within conditions of rapid transformation, migration, and globalization. Growing up between Germany and Vietnam has deeply shaped her interest in diasporic memory, intergenerational exchange, and the emotional dimensions of cultural belonging. She approaches these questions not only academically, but also through collaborative and socially engaged cultural practice.

Within the fellowship project “Affective Nourishment,” she explores how Vietnamese altar practices, food rituals, and domestic spaces function as affective and spiritual forms of care within Vietnamese diasporic communities. Food, ritual, and hospitality are not simply cultural traditions, but living social practices through which emotional memory, ancestral connection, and collective identity continue to be transmitted across generations and geographic distance. The project also reflects on the historical transformations of post-war Vietnam and their long-term social and emotional consequences. The rapid shifts in Vietnamese society after the war fundamentally changed communal structures, urban life, family dynamics, and relationships to tradition and spirituality. Through anthropological and artistic collaboration, she is interested in understanding how these changes continue to shape contemporary experiences of memory, migration, care, and belonging today.

This research is closely connected to XOAY, the cultural café and interdisciplinary community space we are currently developing in Hanoi. XOAY functions as a hybrid platform where art, research, food, conversation, and community intersect. Through exhibitions, workshops, screenings, artist talks, and communal gatherings, the space creates opportunities for younger Vietnamese creatives, researchers, artists, and diasporic voices to connect and exchange perspectives. For her, XOAY is important because it transforms research into lived social practice. Many of the questions explored within my work, such as affect, hospitality, community, intergenerational dialogue, ritual continuity, and emotional care, already emerge naturally within these shared everyday encounters. The café, therefore, becomes not only a cultural venue but also a living research environment and a space for collective knowledge production.

Within the CRC fellowship, she hopes to deepen these investigations through anthropological and audiovisual research, while contributing to broader discussions around affect studies, decoloniality, migration, and community-based forms of cultural practice and knowledge.

Publications (selected)

• Co-Existence (2024), Curator and Co-Author
• XOAY Cultural Space, Hanoi (since 2024)
• “wir memory” installation project (2021)