THE COFFEE WORLD MUSEUM, VIETNAM

The territory surrounding Buon Ma Thuot, in Vietnam, is famous all over the world for the production of coffee. The area, in addition to being one of the most intensive coffee world producers -Vietnam is the second largest exporter in the world- also corresponds to the first establishment of the Trung Nguyen Investment Group, a Vietnamese multinational today leader in the production, export and supply of coffee. Now headquartered in the capital of Saigon, the group, with hundreds of retails and selling points sales throughout Asia, exports more than 2,000 tons of coffee every year.

Trung Nguyen wanted to make public his material collections and his research on coffee, through the construction of a dedicated museum, which tells the origin of coffee and the link with the populations of the territory: an homage to the story of the famous stimulating drink.

A project of international, experimental strong impact, not only for the considerable size of the museum -almost 10,000 square meters, including 3 exhibition galleries, a bistro, soon a library and a multifunctional area for events and educational activities-, but also for the cultural content of the museum and for the exhibition design.

The museum tells the history of coffee as intimately related to the history of human development: around the cultivation of coffee, its harvesting, preservation and manufacturing, nomadic and stable civilization have evolved, as well as technologies and rituals.

The team that developed the project, is fully international, professionals from at least 10 countries have collaborated in the project, but the choice for the curation and design of the exhibition was Current Corporate: “We were immediately struck by the elegance of Trung Nguyen and his absolute dedication to coffee, which in the hands of this company becomes at the same time an instrument of collective development and an art, very close to the Zen concept”.

Current‘s proposal was: to transferring historical awareness through coffee, and to tell that of coffee as an artistic, aesthetic, spiritual experience, capable of bringing us into contact with the primitive force.human

The museum presents different types of items and stimulations, from the sound (the sounds of the ancient leather drums, whose roaring sound has marked for centuries the life of the Vietnamese populations), to the smell, to the tactile, passing through the contact with the volcanic soil which makes Vietnamese coffee grow so delicious, than theEuropean machines for manufacturing, the precious Ottoman metals used to serve it, finally reaching the refined Zen rituals that make it an instrument of contemplation.

The museum was inaugurated on November 25, with an international gala that also saw a fashion show dedicated to silk, another product of excellence “made in Vietnam”