Walking and narrating SoundBorderscapes: an experience in Hong Kong

Abstract

Today, borders are less and less linear and become pervasive and mobile, acquiring an unprecedented significance in every field of our life. At the same time, cultural identities are both reinforced and diluted through global processes and resistances that manifests themselves in very different, ambiguous and conflictual ways, often becoming a site of struggle. Since 2016, I have been reflecting on these issues in relation with the sound arts and proposed the notion of ‘SoundBorderscapes’ (Biserna, 2017) to suggest listening as a useful instrument for a critical epistemology of the border. Then, in 2019, I had an occasion to develop a collective practice-based project in Hong Kong with local artists and I proposed to focus on identity politics in Hong Kong and to do it by exploring its borders. By taking into account the ‘symbolic power’ of borders in organising cultural difference (Balibar, 1994), I wanted to start a critical inquiry on the different forms of border both inside and at the margins of its territory. Our challenge was to rethink the image of the border in Hong Kong as a line of separation between different and homogeneous entities to listen to it as a membrane constantly produced or traversed by different kind of fluxes, relations, bodies, and performed also through our spatial practices and representations. Using an auto ethnographic approach, this chapter focuses on this project – its methodology and aims, but also its ambiguities and contradictions – as a way to address the potential and limits of listening and walking in questioning the cartographic device, its conception of space, its ideology, its politics and its effects; as a way of interrogating my listening practices, position and orientation when working on site; and as a way of reflecting on subjective narratives as situated representations of space.