Interrogating Public Space is an ongoing series of interviews by Creative Time Curator Nato Thompson with artists, theorists, policy makers, and community organizers about the issues surrounding public space. These questions serve to complicate and broaden the notion of what constitutes a public practice and what mechanisms are available to increase social justice. As the study of space has grown to include multiple discourses, this investigation anticipates finding connecting issues that bring together disparate forms of analysis—from public housing to theme parks to public art to community organizing to interventions.
Author Archive for ben
In 2006 I met a remarkable 90-year-old woman in Hong Kong. She was a Chinese herbalist who once worked in the Kowloon Walled City — the infamous, anomalous zone of Hong Kong where no government actually ruled, with all the possibility and danger this might imply in such a context, and where life was a series of alleyways and tunnels that burrowed into an almost solid mass of interconnected buildings. I wrote about it here.
I interviewed her for a new media oral history project that approached this area of Hong Kong in terms of people’s memories and feelings of space, place and movement. What are our histories of coming to a place that becomes home? What do we bring with us, and what do we leave behind? What moods does our home have? This old woman had remarkable stories. Of being a field doctor during the Second World War, and seeing rivers of blood in the wake of battles between the Kuomingtang and Japanese armies. Of arriving in Hong Kong, and carving out spaces in the Walled City for her extended family to live. Of having patients who still saw her, decades after she cared for them as kids growing up in the Walled City.
After recently sending her a belated birthday card, this week I found out that she died last year. I’m still working on my project. I think she has finished hers. I guess this is a reminder to keep our links alive, in all the ways that this could mean.
Ben Hoh is a designer, writer, media artist and community cultural development worker, with a particular interest in how people engage creatively with memory and place. Ben’s writing has been performed at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, and has appeared in the journals Public and Borderlands, and in the anthology Waiting In Space (Pluto Press 199); his short plays have been performed at Belvoir St Theatre and Stables Theatre. Ben’s community cultural development projects include Storybox and Suburban Crossings, which both deal with electronically exploring the everyday life spaces of migration. Ben has created websites for SBS, Lee Jeans, Disney and Information and Cultural Exchange, and his work has won two Australian Interactive Media Industry Awards. He created motion graphics for the Sydney Writers’ Festival’s “Hip Hop Projections” event in 2007. Ben is currently writing a Masters thesis about online, first-person accounts of war, and is a founding member of the interdisciplinary art/research group Tracer.
There’s a new issue of the Trans/forming Cultures eJournal called Landscapes of Meaning: South Asia-Australia Connections: environment & people, which touches on a few of the issues explored in our project.
Today in the workshop, we were talking about the aspirations and goals we have for our work, the obstacles in the way of achieving them, and the steps we could take to overcome them and get there. Ali talked about his parkour practice, and in terms of this practice of urban movement, you look around and use what you have around you to negotiate your obstacles. Restating these big tasks in terms of the real movement of the body was very exciting and helpful.