Informed by the affective logic within critical design practices, Sam Van Vo’s work reinterprets artifacts, architecture, and cultural symbols inexplicably and irrevocably marred by colonial histories, translating them into materialized proxies for emotional states—particularly those rendered illegible or unpalatable. By inciting these responses into a transdisciplinary framework, the work challenges the systems through which colonial structures persist and serve as constraints. Through this framework, memory, disillusion, and the implementation of control are examined as part of a socially engaged, creative praxis.

Industrial materials—concrete, steel, plastics, and electronics—evoke post-colonial nihilism within a brutalist hegemony. Form becomes an embodiment of emotive conditions deemed unacceptable, regardless of legitimacy. As a social practice that hybridizes technological and cultural discourse, the work occupies an intermediary space between reclaiming self-authorship and the ease with which such autonomy is ceded to political and technological institutions.

By escalating the tension between self-determination, the inherent value of obedience, and mechanisms of control, Vo challenges the stagnation and complacency of narratives whose apocryphal optimism has collapsed. Examining how colonial, political, and technological influence structures perception and imposes constraints positions agitation as a productive lens through which intellectual discourse can expand. In doing so, the practice interrogates the legitimacy of peace, the utility of violence, and advocates for confrontation and agency in negotiating personal and communal complicity.