Dilemma Studio
Dilemma is an experimental research collaborative operates in the field of art, architecture and urbanism. Dilemma commits to responding to the uprising and complex socio-political questions in Hong Kong through provocations and actual initiations. Their scope of research ranges from the continuance and attachment of places through to the innovating newness from the existing. The group specializes in inventing drawing methodology and experimental detailed designs. Dilemma’s works have received more than thirty international design and architecture awards. The ultimate aim of Dilemma is to bring together different design disciplines around architecture to perform projects that bring potential positiveness to society, from social to radical or political proposals, which architects solely could not achieve. This form of collaborative practice allows fluid and efficient conveyance of sensitive notions into actualities.
Exhibition
The Predictable Accident
19 Dec 2019 - 15 Mar 2020
10:00 - 22:00
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THE MILLS
In the midst of silence during 2020, a prophesied collision quietly arouses across Hong Kong from the opposing behaviours and rituals of the divided opinions. The clash suggests the long misjudgement of district curation on community, culture or identity by means of refraining and erasing, rather than a constructive realisation of oneself. Accumulation of ignorance to the residence’s necessities and emotions are made by beneficial prioritisation of city tycoons and large enterprises.
Within Tsuen Wan district, more than 50 bridges of the approximately 800 footbridges established in Hong Kong were built as the Tsuen Wan Footbridge Network, concluding the monopoly over the people’s daily routine to framing their habits. Listed developments provide footbridges, nihil without intentions apart from transport, in the creation of a majorly private network. It formulates a collaged infrastructure puppeted by the ones in power. Linear and lazy directionality are made between nodes such as metro station to shopping malls, creating ‘Skips’ that isolates street life, sceneries and district heritages. Detachments from neighborhood’s placemaking ideology are made apparent, indirectly unfold the bipolar interpretation on social values. Enjoying the footbridge network became an act of acknowledgement to the superpower manipulating your habitat.
Divergences are better delineated by the initiations, street walker’s enthusiasm contributed in an invisible economic circle that crowdfunded events and the resultant built structures. Under the absolute concrete context to establish parasitic interventions and altered states of linking vessels, they experiment with the method of traversing and public spaces in the form of roofscapes and connectors. New autonomous bridge system brings Tsuen Wan district’s image and distinctiveness to light. Ten main artefacts assembled the Tsuen Wan’s Collaborative Framework target at alleviating tensions, educating ‘Hong Kong-ness’, developing a sense of identity and civic pride.
Tsuen Wan Collaborative Framework’s Artefacts:
1. Opening Ceremony
2. Procession Lane
3. Souvenir Complex
4. Uni-Gala Castle
5. Festival Committee HQ
6. Nostalgists Playground
7. Squarish Cornered Hill
8. Rage Room
9. The Greatest Wall
10. Repaired Object
These artefacts are amalgamations of contextual precedents derived from the Hong Kong Festivals in the 70s and artificial amnesia to invent spaces for fostering the belongingness and realisation of individual responsibility. Artefacts are event infrastructures that reactivate the neglected, presenting together as ‘Hong Kong’s biggest community project, and truly a festival of the people.’. They are proposed as individual projects that operate simultaneously and contribute as one masterpiece. Festival Committees invite citizens to take part in organising and participating in the events to keep all classes involved. Activities induced by the ten artefacts vary as diverse as possible to include all kinds of interests, and demonstrate Hong Kong’s depth of layered culture. Instead of a formal programmatic arrangements, pop-up events and regular social activities are the design focus in the Collaborative Framework to depict cultures and provoke vanished history which are difficult to be categorised.
This Predictable Accident has always lay underneath the background of Hong Kong as the city is an unresolved paradox; Progression of Hong Kong’s authenticity are only made by open selections of identities and refinement through learning from the foreign influences and the irreplaceable history.
