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Justin Talplacido Shoulder (Phasmahammer) ‘The Littoral Drift’

Date
Nov 7, 2026

Venue

Special Events Gallery, Hong Kong Maritime Museum
Central Pier No. 8, Man Kwong Street, Central, Hong Kong

The third newly commissioned performance in the live art series ‘Elsewhere in Me’

Sat 7 Nov 2026, 5:30pm
Limited spots available – register here!

For over a decade, Phasmahammer has been co-creating ‘Nightcraft’ – a collaborative practice that makes alternate spaces for collective presence and social worlds. Informed by witchcraft, the nighttime subverts familiar roles and social orders, making room for expanded ways of sensing and marginalised voices. These happenings are sites of solidarity and communal healing, bridging the ancestral and futuristic, while Phasmahammer’s work across nightclubs, galleries, and theatres cultivate a parallel ecology to rehearse possible futures.

In The Littoral Drift, new creatures emerge at dusk from the littoral zone where land meets water, shifting constantly with tides and currents. Inspired by amphibious species and hybrid bodies, the work explores survival and adaptive strategies in fluctuating living conditions, with gestures of inbetweenness—ingesting and surrendering, turning inward and outwards, circling in loops—drawing on local species from Hong Kong’s island landscapes. Aquatic fragments assemble into wearable miniatures and prosthetics, extending bodies into hybrid forms. The interspecies figure resists parasitic or symbiotic beings, aspiring to the fluid states between human and non-human forms.

Presented at a former pier overlooking Victoria Harbour, the performance considers the shifting coastline as a witness to Hong Kong’s changing times—a landscape shaped by ongoing urban developments and mounting ecological collapse. As bodies become currents in real time, Phasmahammer shapeshifts through evolving states of becoming, navigating shifting relationships between water and land and the possibility of refuge: like the twilight and littoral zones, thresholds are not simply boundaries to traverse but shared spaces and conditions to inhabit.

  • Lead Artist & Performer: Justin Talplacido Shoulder (Phasmahammer)
  • Sound Design & Composer: Corin Ileto, Hui Tak Cheung
  • Mentor: Victoria Hunt
  • Costume & Set Design: Matthew Stegh, Justin Talplacido Shoulder, Ash Kok, and Sebastian Nocelli
  • Lighting Design: Fausto Brusamolino
  • Sound Mastering: Hui Tak Cheung
  • Producer: Jason Cross for Insite Arts (Australia)
  • Graphic Design: The Exercises

About the artist

Justin Talplacido Shoulder (Phasmahammer)
1985, Sydney, Monkerai-based

Justin Talplacido Shoulder (Phasmahammer) is a shape-shifting artist and storyteller, working primarily in performance, sculpture, video and collective events. Also known as Phasmahammer, their practice is an eco-cosmology of hybrid bodies that collage distinct elements and attributes of machine, human and more-than-human entities. Creatures birthed are embodied through hand-crafted costumes and prosthesis and animated by their own gestural languages. The artist uses their body and craft as an instrument of metaphysics towards a syncretic Future Folklore. Shoulder believes in performance and shared ceremony as communal medicine for difficult times.

Support

Para Site Art Space is financially supported by the Art Development Matching Grants Scheme of the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

The content of this conference does not reflect the views of the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.