Mediation
Circa 2016—2025
Compiled in 2025
Photography (Colour), Text
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We stack ourselves into Tetris blocks along the side of roads. A jumbled mishmash of humanity. My ceiling’s your floor. Between us are thin walls, invisible boundaries, physical and psychic, scratched by experience and marked by the week’s grime. We share communal rubbish bins, lifts, maintenance notices, and resident advisories reminding us not to spit in the lifts or throw rubbish from our windows, lest it inconvenience other residents or cause injuries to those below.
Soon, I’ll have been in Hong Kong for ten years. I smile at the thought. The smile is returned by a beautiful woman over spaghetti, a billboard for a restaurant across the street. She’s telling me to ‘Live Italian. Live with passion.’ Being half Neapolitan, I make a promise to myself to try to meet her halfway. I don’t want to let the team down.
People describe Italy as an open-air museum, un museo all’aperto. But isn’t the same true anywhere? Places, especially cities, wear their identities differently. Some preserve marble ruins. Others archive themselves in red, white and blue polypropylene wrapping, greasy laminated menus, and flyers pasted to shuttered shopfronts.
I suppose it doesn’t really matter where you go. The stories of a place don’t sit still. They peel off, emigrate, or are eaten for lunch. They live among us in impermanence.
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