Haijiao Ma: What do you think about Hong Kong?

I think you’re serious. Fishes in plastic bags don’t move a lot.
Plastic bag top left. Two fishes. Moving fast.
Plastic bag middle right. One fish. Moving slowly.
Plastic bag top right . Three fishes. Not moving.
Plastic bag bottom left. Four fishes. Moving fast.

Throughout the whole semester of the 1st pilot of “Transcultural Collaboration” in autumn 2015 we are having a regular and continuous lecture series framing and defining the program focussing on various aspects of “Transculturality”, which is the core topic of this graduate semester program.

Tutu and Ida, a team of Chinese and German investigators invite the audience to follow their journeys exploring the unexpected in the city of Hong Kong not knowing where everything will end up.

When you go on a journey you have a goal. Most of the time you have a particular place in mind and an idea of what you are going to do there. Most people follow a certain path and even plan their whole trip from the beginning to the end. A map helps you to orientate yourself in unknown places. If you get lost you asked google maps where you are and it leads you to your chosen location. But what happens if you get lost? Maybe you end up somewhere you never would have expected.
What does it feel like to get lost, being a stranger in Hong Kong?

Live Performance by Mayumi Arai & Nina Willimann

1) to ​mix with and ​join ​society or a ​group of ​people, often changing to suit their way of ​life, ​habits, and ​customs.
2) to ​combine two or more things in ​order to ​become more ​effective.

As a martial art, T’ai Chi is externally a soft exercise, but internally hard, even as it seeks softness. If we are externally soft, after a long time we will naturally develop internal hardness. It’s not that we consciously cultivate hardness, for in reality our mind is on softness. What is difficult is to remain internally reserved, to possess hardness without expressing it, always externally meeting the opponent with softness. Meeting hardness with softness causes the opponent’s hardness to be transformed and disappear into nothingness.

Uniform adjective: Remaining the same in all cases and at all times; unchanging in form or character. Denoting a garment forming part of a person’s uniform.
Uniform noun: The distinctive clothing worn by members of the same organization or body or by children attending certain schools

Three people in a room. Painting, composing, filming. Neck-deep.
Trying to make it bloom. Boom

Simon Dietersdorfer: What is the soundtrack of your life?
Ida Sons: How would you preserve the memories, experiences and emotions during the time in Hong Kong?

Dorothy Wong: Did your perception of Asian/European people change since joining the program?
Fabian Gutscher: Read a part of your motivation letter for this program.

Jude Liu: Do you think animals in captivity consider the zoo as their home?
Benjamin Ryser: What would you do differently if you were the leader of your group?

Ana-Maria Negrea: What is one of your weaknesses?
Charan Li: How would you imagine yourself as a 80 years old?

Mayumi Arai: Does the program have an influence on your personal artistic work and thinking? If not now, can you imagine it having an impact on your work in the future?
Philipp Spielmann: What is your favorite restaurant or best food experience in Hong Kong?

Hong Kong is probably the worst place for inter- or multicultural romanticism. Whoever believes that cultures, for instance Western and Far Eastern ones, are necessarily distinct entities will be disappointed here. HK rather suggests that singularity and similarity might as well be the two sides of the same coin. Exoticizing and othering tendencies have a hard time in HK, notwithstanding the persistence of difference. Especially HK island is a genuine transcultural place. The “inter” in interculturality presupposes that there are still at least two distinct cultures and a void between them. The prefix “trans” refers to “beyond” and “through”, hence “transcultural” suggests that we can go beyond given understandings of culture, that we can move through cultures.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-fZGqnTDmAVideo can’t be loaded because JavaScript is disabled: Trailer for final art work of Bloom Room (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-fZGqnTDmA) Made by AnaBruceCimon.

https://youtu.be/MTvADkwb7YcVideo can’t be loaded because JavaScript is disabled: exploited-fxxking dead banana (https://youtu.be/MTvADkwb7Yc) Exploited_by AnaBruceCimon

F(increasing volume and speed): Humor, Nonsens, Absurdity, Humbug, Rubbish, Poppycock, Piffle, FlimFlam, FiddleFaddle, Malarkey, Flapdoodle, Bushwa, Tomfoolery, Bosh, Folderol.
during this listing the sergeant dies of an heart attack & so he gets reanimated by the three privates, but the scene goes on without any comment about it
S: I thought your work was gonna be about „Plants. Plants. Plants. Plants. Plants. Plants. Plants. and Personalities and Identities“.
B: Well, that was just some sort of „Topical Island“.

Blanket! Rope!
Somehow these two phrases became the major key words of the performance. We had our meeting under the blanket, and prepared the tryout performance of the rope in park with elementary school children. How a child play with flashlight under the blanket in the middle of the night, telling stories to their siblings or friends? How exactly did we play? Hong Kong was the tireless energy that pushed and embraced us. There were moments when the energy seemed to be overwhelming, suffocating even like a blanket on the face, strangling like a robe on the chest. Still there were also moments of pure naïve, and Hong Kong gave you whole freedom to play. The contradiction of city as a playground or a gigantic concrete jungle are the two contradictions we began to rationalize in the performance, and a crucial dynamic for us to come around.

Come and drift with us through a space of experimentation on 26 September in XXX club. Immerse in a party night with performances. Artists from Hong Kong, Mainland, Taiwan, Japan and Europe in collaborative action with live music, dj’s, performances, visuals, installations and interactions.

Lecturer by Ouyang-Yu
Author, Melbourne and Shanghai

‘Migration for Good, for an Eternal Étranger’, a topic Ouyang Yu will be talking about in which he’ll describe his experience as an Australian citizen living and teaching in China where he was born, how his writings are censored in both China and Australia, for the similar reasons of unmarketability, and how he lives as a poet and novelist writing in two languages in two countries, with English unpublishable in China and Chinese unpublishable in Australia, or only to a very limited degree.

Hangzhou by Ana Beach Day   https://vimeo.com/146738434  

Lecture by Gordon Mathews
Professor of anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong

Who are we? Today two contradictory discourses shape our cultural identities, those of the state and of the market. The state tells us that we should love our country, while the market tells us that we should love money and choice. Both of these forces are based on lies, but because we are immersed in these discourses, we cannot easily see this. Hong Kong is unusual in the world, in that it has long been based not on the discourse of the state, but only on that of the market.

Workshop by Brandon Farnsworth, Music Curator

Through a mix of presentations and performances, the Connecting Sound Workshop offered a space for artists working in various performing arts fields to come together in a relaxed atmosphere and share practices, ideas, and experiences. It offered a space that promoted unexpected encounters while placing no emphasis on finished products, preferring rather to spill into the eternal flow of practice.

https://vimeo.com/146733919