Surface Tension
Photography (Colour)
My mother’s maiden name, Polvere, means “dust.” Benevento, the Campanian city we’re from, means “fair wind”. A people of dust from a town of fair wind.
Hong Kong, my home for the past ten years, is a city of dust. It enters through my lungs and departs through my skin. My camera works the same way: light enters through an aperture, and its sensor holds what passes through.
When construction workers unearthed a 450-kilogram bomb across the road from our building, we were nine thousand kilometres away, watching the evacuation on a phone. The ground had held it since 1945. But the ground here is not ground, it’s a harbour floor, reclaimed and paved over.
The cicadas on the hillside know something about this. They can spend years underground before emerging for a single season of noise. They sing from the trees in summer, filling the apartment with their pulsing drone. This frequency predates the city, the reclaimed land, and everything built upon it.
At dusk, I go up to the rooftop. Dragon statuettes face the water. Below, the MTR surfaces briefly before diving back underground. Black kites circle above the ridge, riding thermals that rise from the heated concrete. The wind carries the day’s dust eastward, past the basketball courts and the cargo ships anchored in the harbour, towards open water.
I stand in it—the wind, the dust, the fading signal of the day—and feel, briefly, like part of the current.