Non-place/Other Space: the sight-and-sound archive of untold anecdotes for Hong Kong and Macao

Is there a role art can play in cultural memeory? What kind of a role? What kind of cultural memory? In working through chaos and disorder of documents in my field work as a visual ethnography, and in piecing together fragments of sights and sounds into an image discourse, I was drawn into a renewed interest in the meaning of 'montage'. Non-place ▪ Other Space compiles fragments of the city space in Hong Kong and Macao (1991-2008) to assert the possibility of many spaces and temporal sheets in one single framed discourse. The sight and sound fragments are pregnant with anecdotal resonance as yet to be made explicit. Non-place ▪ Other Space is therefore an archive of visual quotations of vanished places whose stories beg to be told: the history of Hong Kong's harbor shore, the elimination of communal life for urban renewal, top-down engineered cultural management for tourism and so on.from remarks: Due to conflict of schedule, I was not able to deliver my lecture in person in Austria, and instead, I sent in a written essay to be read to accompany the presentation of my art work.