Political Archipelago: Repoliticizing Post-Umbrella Revolution Hong Kong

This project aims to re-politicize the public sphere of post-Umbrella Revolution Hong Kong. Umbrella Revolution was one of the latest defining events of democratic struggles in Hong Kong. Like other protests, civil disobedience and revolutions, Umbrella Revolution was more than just “organized public dissents”; it was an experiment of an alternative democratic sphere for agonistic struggles. The occupation temporarily altered, reoriented, disoriented or debilitated the existing boundaries and thresholds in the city; it resisted the logic of the city to create a space of exception. However, these temporary alterations did not leave significant permanent imprints to the city. At the end, these temporary traces of an alternative democratic sphere are turned into the banal background of the everyday life. The city once again falls back into the orchestrated amnesia as part of their capitalist fantasy. The Political Archipelago is a provocation of permanently temporal resistance to the city. This resistance anticipates its certain erasure, and evolves from its remnants. The Political Archipelago consists of four “islands of exceptions” in Hong Kong. They were previous occupied sites during the Umbrella Revolution. Each island is a unique fragment of the previous alternative democratic sphere. This project proposes various operations of tracing to turn these intangible fragments into persistent tools for political change