合| hé | Confluence

“You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche

For Detour 2017, ‘Harmonious Chaos’, Bloom, the Hong Kong based collective of installation artists, architects and electronics specialists created the central project with their 14m high interactive walkway, ‘合| hé | confluence’. The installation took its starting point from the Chinese symbol ‘合’, broadly expressing the theme of togetherness, to join or to make whole. Bloom explains; ‘’Commonly in our work we try to express the synergy an individual has with the city around them. Through working with this year’s theme ‘harmonious chaos’, we sought to express and highlight a sense of togetherness in the main courtyard. Within the otherwise disparate and fleeting journeys people make within the city we wanted to collate and express a unification within the centre piece, constructing a tower of light’’. In many other ways, the gateway highlighted a tension in the space between the two PMQ halves. Referencing Hong Kong’s urban chasms that exist in the back streets through and around the densely populated surrounding streetscapes. Bloom. 2017.