The Five Senses of The Future 

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 are blending with emotions, here everything is possible, just listen to your soul. We are in the Hong Kong Pavilion, a cave of colours, fabrics, and recycled clothes, and above all the urban and human secrets. The place we call the City, which is the place for living, is our Home. Observe and listen, move slowly within free, visionary, and magical space. You are about to dialogue with an Architecture – which evokes Emotion and Brightness, where recycled fabrics build, protect, preserve and amplify the word Love. The Hong Kong Pavilion tells of a visionary place that exists, that breathes and that loves. Now listen and love. Hong Kong is luminous, colourful, and dense, yet electromagnetic, takes the form of light and nature, as well as structured and rebellious, sacred, and profound. The most intimate and secret Hong Kong, where aromas and perfumes envelop its inhabitants. Until they discover that there are sheer, soft layers of colour, in the Hong Kong of the future, where everyone leaves home wearing clothes made with recycled plastic bags, each part is knotted, every detail is entrusted to the wind and light, there is no weight but only lightness, there is no consumption but reuse. As I had anticipated, your feet will lead you to a Place of Living, where there are words-emotions and every gesture creates a memory-room.The place of the senses, the place of encounter, the place of flying thought. The place of love. 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 breathing when you feel your soul-expanding, 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.The pavilion of sustainability, recycling, and fashion. Old tablecloths become walls of light, old curtains are transformed into arches that keep secrets and images, plastic bags are transformed into flying skirts, and the city becomes a garden suspended in a present that is already the future. Light envelops and seduces, as happens on Hong Kong Island, everything is power, history, and vision. The senses wake up and guide the visitor towards a path of images, sounds, textures, colours, and sensations, a present that is dressed in the future, is dressed in sustainability and architecture.The Pavilion welcomes students and artists, photographers and video makers, to feel the story of Hong Kong, its struggles, the protest, the tight spaces yet very human. With the juxtaposition of nature and humankind, their basic needs, the tastes and foods between East and West, Sheung Wan's perfumes and spices, secret temples, hidden bars, restaurants and more, to uncontaminated, natural places like Sai Kung. One morning you will wake up in the future Hong Kong, where plastic and used fabrics will animate the streets of central Queens Road. The magic of breath and light will take place, emotional rain, and the soul will envelop a deep human connection. (Manuela Catania)

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