“Cities of Desire”

Tearing a few pages from Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (1980) and numerous Situationist writings, “Cities of Desire” brings together artists, architects, theorists, photojournalists, activists, and politicians from Hong Kong and Vienna whose overriding interest in rethinking and co-opting urban space is timely. As recent exhibitions including Mass MoCA’s 2005 “The Interventionists” have revealed, the issue of urban/social space, and its relationship to democracy, identity, and autonomy, is keenly felt and contested everywhere.

Few cities would be as appropriate to address this issue as Hong Kong, where ongoing battles over specific city sites regularly reach the pages of the dailies. Events such as picnics in the “Times Square” plaza (a huge, vertical office-cum-mall in Causeway Bay), community “flower” paintings on the streets of Sham Sui Po, and occupations of historic buildings slotted for demolition such as Queen’s Pier pointedly challenge the hegemony of commercial and authoritarian interests in the organization and use of social space.

Similar occupations and “temporary autonomous zones,” are involved in much of the work in “Cities of Desire.” The Vienna-based group feld72 offer documentation of their Toronto Barbeque, 2002, which depicts them hijacking a length of lawn in the Museum Quarter in Vienna and transforming it into a suburban backyard, complete with white picket fences and kiddie pools. While Cedric Maridet’s sound and video installation Filipina Heterotopia, 2008, pays poignant homage to the Sunday gathering of domestic “helpers” underneath Norman Foster’s famous HSBC headquarters by pairing a recording of the sounds of their lively banter with an image of the site after-hours, empty and forlorn.

Yet where once such interventionist tactics offered imaginative counterproposals to civic life, today city governments––in concert with cultural organizations––happily commission similar “projects,” effectively co-opting and depoliticizing the entire arena. This question of the culpability of cultural organizations (and, by extension, artists) was broached by exhibition curator Hilary Tsui at the end of a charged, idea-filled seminar. Giving pause to panelists and audience alike, the question was an uncomfortable one that everyone managed to dodge until time was up.