heavy

Everything’s still a blur. We’re staying in Hong Kong for another three weeks to tie up some loose ends and hopefully unwind a bit. This means that we’ve just moved house for the fourth time in just over three months. But you’re travellers, you say, so how hard could it be, right? But we’re not really travelling — we actually tried to settle here for a few months to do quite a few different things: create a really ambitious new media art project that incorporates oral history interviews with local people; forge links with local arts and activist organisations; as well as working on my thesis, finishing a large web development job…

To give you an idea of how heavy our shit is, this is what we frequently carry with us on our jaunts around town: two laptops, a digital still camera, a 3 CCD digital video camera, a MiniDisc recorder and microphone, an A4 flatbed scanner (!), assorted power and data cabling, etc.

And in terms of the stuff we’ve been collecting on the way: no, we’re not doing heaps of shopping for clothes and electronic equipment. (Each time we move out of a place, the number of our bags raises eyebrows.) Instead, we’re going to be mostly taking paper back with us, and that’s after we ship the bulk of it back by sea. The smallest organisations here publish prolifically. Last night, for instance, Becky took us to the first Hong Kong Sex Workers’ Film Festival. It was a just bunch of people in a small room of a sex workers’ advocacy NGO, and nonetheless excellent, but the accompanying catalogue was more than a hundred pages long — slick, perfect-bound and with a matt-celloglazed cover. Of course, this is intimately related to the fact that printing in China is terrifyingly cheap, but it’s impressive nonetheless.