HONG KONG.- As part of Para Site’s thirtieth-anniversary celebrations, Elsewhere in Me presents four newly commissioned performances across Hong Kong. Inspired by the organisation’s evolving identities, and the generations of artists who have navigated the shifting local landscape since 1996, the series explores what can emerge from the act of finding one’s way. Unfolding episodically over the next six months, four artists—Yim Sui Fong, River Lin, Tong Wenmin, and Justin Talplacido Shoulder (Phasmahammer)—traverse diverse locations, seek out spaces between thresholds, and make room for unexpected encounters. Here, art becomes a continuous negotiation with the city and those who live it.

Elsewhere in Me centres this group of artists as active wayfinders, reinhabiting and reimagining our urban condition through their multi-faceted practices. Yim Sui Fong (b. 1983, Guangdong, Hong Kong-based) revisits the site and soundscape where Para Site was founded, transforming personal narratives and expressive impulses into sound. Through the act of listening, the project probes the collective resonance that arises between solitude, difference, and mediation, turning shared voices into frequencies. River Lin (b. 1984, Taipei, Paris/Tokyo/Taipei-based) maps a week-long diary of encounters across the city’s terrain, merging private and public realms. These interventions offer juxtapositions within everyday settings, prompting us to pause and reflect on meanings encoded in shared space. Tong Wenmin (b. 1989, Chongqing-based) gathers earth and botanical traces from the cityscape, animating them through the body to assemble a collective ritual. Her sensorial choreography of voice and movement contemplates how natural elements and individuals are entangled within systems of construction. Justin Talplacido Shoulder (Phasmahammer, b. 1985 Sydney, Monkerai-based) pays tribute to local water deities through a queer lens, incubating a hybrid, mythic creature. By channeling animist perspectives, their performance attunes us to hidden organisms and living networks.

The sites of these explorations are portals for embodying new ways of moving, connecting, and finding meaning between ourselves and our surroundings. In today’s world of detours and crossroads, the artists propose possibilities for finding a sense of place. Weaving together sound, movement, ritual, the everyday, and the more-than-human, the programme’s impermanence offers lenses that aim to anchor us in spaces of shared belonging. Elsewhere in Me is not to be found elsewhere; it is present here in our common ground.

Curated by Celia Ho and Jessie Kwok.