hkfringe club

The archive gallery, as an invented program resembling the traditional buried-torpedo type time capsule but in the scale of a city, is a mnemonic device for the registration, retention and recall of memory, a place where private memories (the archive) are separated from but reflective of the collective memories (the gallery) of the city itself.

As a collapsible set of realities, and/or virtualities, described in a language of semiotics - the semiosic- (symbolic) and catoptric (reflective) universe - the intention is to concretise, in terms of program, the interchange between the labyrinthine character and mirror reflectivity of both the city (the outer world) and memory (the inner self).

"The catoptric universe is a reality which can give the impression of virtuality, whereas the semiosic universe is a virtuality which can give the impression of reality."
Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language

The archive gallery is about architecture of labyrinth and mirror, which functions as the labyrinth (network) and as the mirror (images of containment) simultaneously.

As labyrinth (network), it mediates spatial units and their relationships to one another. It mediates

"the relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past: the height of a lamppost and the distance from the ground of the usurper's swaying feet...the height of that railing and the leap of the adulterer who climbed over it at dawn... The city... does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of streets, the gratings of windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls."
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

As mirror (images of containment), it defines, self-reflectively, spatial enclosure and ego enclosure. It contains

¡§the big stone Fedora and the little Fedoras in the glass globes. Not because they are equally real, but because all are only assumptions. The one contains what is accepted as necessary when it is not yet so; the others, what is imagined as possible and, a moment later, is possible no longer.¡¨
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

The site, in the junction of Sai Yeung Choi Street South and Nelson Street in Mongkok district, is 30m long by 18m wide. The parallel concrete walls rise to a height of about 30m,a point which the opposite residential blocks align with in elevation, and descend to a depth of about 12m to MTR exit. The sets of opposite parallel walls create a repeated but varied reading of the entire procession spiraling up, with discrete spaces in between.



This is the original abstract of my thesis ¡§Total Recall: Encapsulating City and Memory¡¨ in 2002.
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© Winnie Chan Yuen-lai 2002