Sonorous Archipelaghost
“Sonorous Archipelaghost” is an audiovisual installation that emerges from Marie Lecuyer’s anthropological field research here in Hong Kong. It is an open work constructed with a collection of investigative materials, that she hopes will in turn prompt the audience to reflect upon their own relation to finitude. Her collaboration with musician Alok Leung rendered the sound of an (under)world palpable with a potentiality to propagating through radio waves. Stay tuned, bring your radio!
Location: 3rd Wave Studio, Hollywood Building, Unit B, 2/F, 186 Upper Station Street, Sheung Wan
3rd Wave Studio - 186號上差館里荷里活大樓2B室
Time: Thursday 23rd December 2021, 5pm
Research abstract:
D’ailleurs, c’est toujours les autres qui meurent. — Marcel Duchamp
By the way, it’s always other people who die. — Marcel Duchamp
Hong Kong has one of the most liquid real estate market in the world, and it is amidst the archipelago’s liquid urban fabric, that burials have taken an oceanic turn: floating and insular cemeteries, parks and oceanic zones dedicated to the scattering of ashes, and web platforms on which one can “surf” to visit the dead, have emerged. This research attends to the “emergenseas” of resting places of the dead and the creative ways by which people invoke and care for the dead in spite of their disappearance. For that matter it asks: how does Hong Kong’s liquid geographic and economic milieu affects, and potentially dissolves, Hong Kong’s spectral ecologies comprising ghosts, ancestors and gods ? To sense the modalities by which the dead disappear from and re-appear among the living, I build on the spectral turn in anthropology, and take on a media ecological approach. This allows me to apprehend how the dead come to matter through contemporary and watery media. To consider media’s capacity to archive, or erase, death trajectories, I develop an amphibious methodology, at once multi site and multimedia, by spending 7 months of field research mapping out the sonorous islands composing Hong Kong’s “archipelaghost.”
