05/01/2024

Exhibited during MIT Thesis Final Review

Hong Kong, SAR

Advisors:
Arindam Dutta,
Carrie Norman,
Jaffer Kolb

Published:
MIT DSpace

EXŒRCISING A HAUNTED CITY

With the looming threat of cultural erasure posed by Hong Kong’s repatriation to China no later than 2047, rituals emerge as the last resource sustaining the collective identity of the city. This thesis documents, through the study of local Taoist-Buddhist practices, the choreographies of rituals as a reparative tool to resist the disappearance of local culture. It is linked to findings from everyday domestic offerings to ancestors, annual festive performances of traumatic cleansing, and the booming clientele businesses of precautionary rites, all of which demonstrate their spatial and temporal qualities as methods to resist modern state control.

To retain the residue of pre-modern practices as a critique of socio-political turmoil, this thesis suggests an alternative design that preserves and promotes the annual ghost festival for public participation. By revising the festival’s pilgrimage route and ritual sheds, this thesis transforms the traditional nature of ephemeral scaffoldings into permanent poles and follies. Situated along the city’s most haunted public estate, these structures are programmed as public facilities for fitness training and children’s playscapes. During the festival, they will be activated into ritual sheds, demonstrating a formal and functional contrast between the everyday and the ritual—from form to formlessness, exposure to closure, and lightness to heaviness.

Designed to evade institutional surveillance, these clandestine transformations preserve solidarity and identity not by emphasizing the significance of priests exorcising in rituals, but by highlighting the quotidian motor memories developed from locals exercising within. The duality of ritual and everyday movements shall exercise the ghosts of a haunted city.