Para Site Collective is a team of artists, architects, curators, critics, designers, educators, and researchers. The Collective generates ideas through discussions through meetings, emails, telephone calls, sketches, photographs, and models. Indeed, in an actual world intensely linked up by virtual spaces, how do we orient ourselves? How can we respond?
In the borrowed time and borrowed space in the Venice Biennale, the Para Site Collective continues to play the role of a facilitator. Always already both GLObal and loCAL, Para Site Collective builds compartments in the Hong Kong exhibition site to interrupt the Venice Biennale sight and site. What kinds of interruption are possible? Will the compartments serve as resting places, docks, temporary shelters, dwellings, or little theatres for visitors? The meanings are up to the visitors to imbue, for seeing, walking, smelling, touching, and listening are all creative acts, let alone engaging in dialogues and indulging in dreams. For the Collective, these compartments offer multiple possibilities and starting points for interrupting the visitors’ familiar experiences. The exhibition site of the Hong Kong Arts Development Council, Hong Kong, China is to become a visitors’ site where boundaries are blurred. Visitors, as much as the members of Para Site Collectives, are at home everywhere, yet nowhere at home.
The horizontally and vertically placed cylindrical compartments are borrowed time and borrowed space on another level, for they provide timely resting places for visitors after an exhausting journey of art touring. Thus the compartments become a space for dreaming and daydreaming. Visitors are encouraged to navigate their path in the artwork and, of course, navigate their dreams in whatever posture they find comfortable. Upon navigating their route in the artwork the visitors experience the frustration and joy of floating, disorientation, lost, and found. The fluidity of the artwork reflects the Collective’s thoughts of navigating Hong Kong in the international art arena.
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