An Việt Archives is the largest known British-Vietnamese archive. It is an ongoing exploration of archives, alternatives, memory work, and community history. AVA believes that an archive is not just a collection of documents, photos, or materials; rather, these mediums are forms of meaning, memory, and knowledge-making. Led by a team of volunteers, AVA cares for the surviving materials of the An Việt Foundation (AVF), a community organisation founded in East London in the 1980s to support thousands of Vietnamese and Southeast Asian refugees. AVF provided essential services - home-cooked meals, help with housing, English classes, health outreach, mother-tongue teaching – and, just as importantly, created a space for displaced people to gather, connect, and ease the isolation of resettlement.
Kaitlan Bui is a Vietnamese American writer and scholar from Orange County, California, currently based in London. Her critical-creative work explores transnational Vietnamese memoryways: how stories of Vietnam (including but not limited to the Vietnam-American War) are inherited, manipulated, and un/documented, and how they can be obedient as well as recalcitrant. Her work has been published with the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists’ Network and Public Books, and exhibited at local theatre and museum exhibitions. Kaitlan previously taught at Cao Đẳng Sư Phạm Bà Rịa Vũng Tàu as a Fulbright Scholar. She is now studying Migration, Diaspora Studies, and Vietnamese at SOAS, University of London as a Marshall Scholar, and on staff with An Việt Archives.
Trà My Hickin works at the intersection of arts and community wellbeing through publishing, editorial, archives, and organising. She uses storytelling and narrative approaches to support social justice, especially with Vietnamese and ESEA migrant communities. She is the editor of Translator, a magazine that translates journalism, and works with Tilted Axis Press, a radical international literary press. She co-directs the An Việt Archives, a British Vietnamese community archive exploring alternative approaches to archiving and memory work, and contributes to various human rights projects, including Minorities in Peace and Security.
Phương Anh Nguyễn is a writer and translator from Vietnam, with works featured on Asymptote, Modern Poetry in Translation, PR&TA and in Here Was Once The Sea: An Anthology of Southeast Asian Eco-Writing among others. In 2024, they participated in NCW Visible Communities virtual residency, exploring the space between memory, archive and translation. Nguyễn works part-time with Tilted Axis Press and volunteers with World Kid Lit.
Cường Minh Bá Phạm works between / in / nearby / at the intersections of sound, community, and archives. Sometimes they intersect, and at times they do not. He started volunteering at the An Việt Foundation in 2017. Slowly, experientially, and perhaps even apprehensively, the An Việt Foundation transitioned, with the help of a community of people, into the An Việt Archives over the years.
Thierry Phung is an artist, producer and videographer born in Montpellier, South of France, and now based in London. He released music on Pan-Asian electronic label Eternal Dragonz, Vietnamese trailblazers Nhac Gãy, and made an EP ‘Children of the Apocalypse’ on Kelman Duran and Comic Ans’ label Scorpio Red. This one was made after a return from Vietnam in late 2019, through multiple lockdowns, up until the present day. Defined by its heavily textural atmospherics and cinematic composition, ‘Children of the Apocalypse’ serves as an attempt to, in ONY’s words, ‘soundtrack the video game I will never create and a reflection on my family history, what it means to be Vietnamese in the south of France.’ He has also been crafting stories on his genre-bending NTS radio show. He mines whatever he finds to craft an immersive and strange musical environment. His shows are by turn dark, ethereal and uncanny, often all at once.