The Five Senses of The Future 

textile installation

Countless Cities Biennial 2021

"People Live Here: A More Human Approach" Farm Cultural Park, Favara, Italy

Created and curated by Manuela Catania

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Welcome to a place of light, where memories blend with emotions. Here, everything is possible, just listen to your soul.

We are inside the Hong Kong Pavilion: a cave of colours, fabrics, and recycled clothes, and above all, urban and human secrets. The place we call the City, the place for living, is our Home.

Observe and listen. Move slowly through this free, visionary, and magical space. You are about to enter into a dialogue with an architecture that evokes emotion and brightness, where recycled fabrics build, protect, preserve, and amplify the word Love.

The Hong Kong Pavilion tells the story of a visionary place that exists, breathes, and loves.

Now listen and love.

Hong Kong is luminous, colourful, and dense, electromagnetic. It takes the form of light and nature, structured yet rebellious, sacred and profound. This is the most intimate and secret Hong Kong, where aromas and perfumes envelop its inhabitants.

Here, in the Hong Kong of the future, you will find sheer, soft layers of colour. People leave home wearing clothes made from recycled plastic bags. Every piece is knotted; every detail is entrusted to the wind and the light. There is no weight, only lightness. No consumption, only reuse.

As I said, your feet will guide you to a Place of Living, where words become emotions, and every gesture creates a memory-room.

The place of the senses.
The place of encounters.
The place of flying thoughts.
The place of love.

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You are now ready to begin a sensory journey.
Fall in love with your steps. Fill yourself with light and meaning. Fall in love with your breath, as your soul expands. Love, again and again.

We live together in this place of the senses, you and I.
Love, Humanity. The Hong Kong Pavilion celebrates life: from the first breath, the first light after nine months of gestation, to birth and evolution. We are inhabitants of light. And in this visionary place we call Hong Kong, we are all human and close. We are all emotion and action. This is a pavilion of sustainability, recycling, and fashion. Old tablecloths become walls of light. Old curtains turn into arches that keep secrets and images.
Plastic bags become flying skirts. The city becomes a garden suspended in a present that is already the future.

Light envelops and seduces, as it does on Hong Kong Island. Everything here is power, history, and vision.

The senses awaken, guiding the visitor along a path of images, sounds, textures, colours, and sensations—a present dressed in the future, in sustainability and architecture.

The Pavilion welcomes students and artists, photographers and video makers, to feel the story of Hong Kong: its struggles, its protests, its tight but deeply human spaces.

Here, nature and humankind meet, alongside their basic needs, their tastes, their food, between East and West. You’ll smell the spices of Sheung Wan, discover secret temples, hidden bars, restaurants, and untouched places like Sai Kung.

One morning, you’ll wake up in the Hong Kong of the future, where plastic and used fabrics animate the streets of Queen’s Road Central.

The magic of breath and light will unfold. Emotional rain will fall.
And the soul will embrace a deep human connection.

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