HEROIC MOTHERS - THE MONASTIC CITY

by Alejandro Abreu

The Project aims to reclaim the Identity of Women in Vietnam through a collective of monastic interventions spread across Hanoi’s roofscape designed to celebrate and improve the livelihoods of the tradeswomen who have been displaced geographically and socioeconomically. By interrogating the monastery typology as a plausible sanctuary to the political and migratory conditions faced by the traders, the project proposes an alternative strategy: to inject an urban-agricultural typology combined with Vietnamese Mother Goddess folk traditions, generating a notion of production and spirituality as an oasis.
Through the shared ownership of the monastic collective, the project aims to blur the existing limitations of the trader’s cyclical migration whilst retaining their rural identities through the production of crops and the preservation of their trade heritage. This cultivates a physical and intangible third space celebrating the collective experience of everyday life of the traders and their traditions.