The Human Library project, focusing on stories of Southern land, is launched at the HCM City Book Street, featuring French-Vietnamese multi-disciplinary artist and designer Cécile Ngọc Sương Perdu (left) as the first narrator. — VNS Photo Phương Mai

HCM CITY — The Nguyễn An Ninh Digital Library, specialising in southern documents, has launched a Human Library project telling stories of the Southern land at the HCM City Book Street on Wednesday.

The project, called Người Nam Bộ Kể Chuyện (Storytellers of Southern land), is initiated by Quách Thu Nguyệt, the library’s manager, who was inspired by the Human Library movement that first started in Denmark in 2000.

In Việt Nam, the project is based on a storytelling format where narrators tell stories of people of the South. The narrators are ordinary Southern people who are preserving and promoting the historical and cultural values of the land.

The number of attendees is limited to ensure connection and create a dialogue space where the listeners can raise questions and suggest their own ideas to the narrator.

For the first session of the project, the organiser invited French-Vietnamese multi-disciplinary artist and designer Cécile Ngọc Sương Perdu to share her story called Đi Tuốt Luốt Bên Tây Rồi Dìa Miền Tây Bày Trò Lộn Xộn (Travel to the West, then come back to Cửu Long (Mekong) Delta to play ‘messy’ game).

Cécile was born and grew up in Cần Thơ City. She earned a Master of Arts in Architecture at the University of Edinburgh in the UK in 2018.

She returned to Việt Nam in 2020 and established Lộn Xộn design studio in Cần Thơ to build an artistic collective for young creatives and ultimately nurture an experimental art community in Cần Thơ and the Mekong Delta.

As the first narrator of the project, Cécile shared her life experiences and love for the culture and people of the South.

She said her best life experience was to travel, listen and learn from the community surrounding her, particularly in the Mekong Delta.

Veteran researcher and educator Bùi Trân Phượng, host of the show, said what Cécile just shared was only one angle, one topic, but it was the best of her life experience.

Phượng said, “The goal of the Human Library project is to listen to stories from Southern people who help us explore and learn more about an angle of culture that we don’t understand.

“Instead of reading a book, we can listen to stories of life from real people and talk with them to gain what we want to know and join in the process of upgrading the book. We contribute to making the book richer, and at the same time, we gain more knowledge.”

All the stories from the project will be compiled for digital documents, which will be archived for the project called Books for the Mekong Delta, launched in December 2025.

The first session of the Human Library project is available to watch at facebook.com/thuvienso.chuyendenambo. — VNS