Para Site is pleased to present Kaifong Orchestra, a year-long research and production project with artist Samson Young. This is the first of a series of long term-collaborations between Para Site and a Hong Kong-based artist meant to facilitate the realization of a major new art project, engaging with the city.
Kaifong Orchestra looks at the formation of orchestras as a community-based practice in Hong Kong, and the historical underpinnings and social exigencies that condition and guard these forms of self-organization. A Cantonese term, Kaifong refers to a group people who live within a single neighborhood and has historically been used as a descriptor to refer to traditional mutual aid organizations that emerged in Hong Kong in 1949 (Kaifong Welfare Association 街坊福利會).
Featuring a strong emphasis on research and pedagogy, Kaifong Orchestra seeks to understand the function of the orchestra and music as tools of our everyday negotiations with politics, power, structures and emotions in a fast-paced place like Hong Kong. Initiated by conversations between Young and Para Site curator Qinyi Lim, Kaifong Orchestra is further guided in a dialogic manner by Giorgio Biancorosso, Associate Professor (Music) at the University of Hong Kong. Biancorosso, whose dual research focuses on European art and music education and Hong Kong cinema, will extrapolate on pre-existing conditions and sociological significance embedded within the knowledge of music in Hong Kong.
The project launches with a conference taking place in Mumbai from June 4-6, 2015 and closes with another conference in Zurich in July 2016. The entire research process for Kaifong Orchestra will involve a series of workshops with practitioners and researchers and culminate with the conceptualization of an artwork that will be exhibited in Hong Kong in 2016.
Kaifong Orchestra is produced in the context of Draft, a year-long project that is anchored in nine cities around the world, and engages with critical discourse and practice related to the public sphere. Draft is a project conceived by Gitanjali Dang, Khanabadosh, Bombay, and Christoph Schenker, Institute for Contemporary Art Research IFCAR, Zurich University of the Arts ZHdK, in partnership with Connecting Spaces Hong Kong – Zurich.