A walk through Hong Kong working-class districts
I am pointing the lens towards the horizon, and the sensor fills up with windows, vertical sequences of balconies, glazings, stairwells, air conditioners; sometimes grey, sometimes coloured, sometimes striped in different materials. The camera wanders in search of another subject, and the focus is lost between the walls, nothing else, on different planes: now they advance, now they go backwards, now they creep into the very narrow mouldings of the facade, where between one wall and another there is only the space of a scaffolding. Endless sequences of identical apartments that stand out vertiginously upwards, that impose themselves magnificently on the narrow urban spaces and that force the observer to bend his gaze to 90 degrees in order to get to understand how far the construction goes.
An immense sequence of empty and full spaces, walls and windows, peeling plaster and falling tiles, installations that climb on claustrophobic interstices between one wall and another.
There is not much distinction between the buildings in Hong Kong's working-class neighbourhoods. They follow one another in an endless chessboard of buildings and open spaces where children run in the shade of the skyscrapers and adults walk from one shop to another filling the bags with dry fish.
There are never too many Western tourists in China, and in these neighbourhoods you can easily become a phenomenon to observe when you walk with a backpack and camera in hand. You are being watched by children hanging from the lianas of a playground, by the elderly sitting on benches, by the ladies behind the glass hanging the laundry to dry in the cramped spaces of the house, away from moisture.
The aim is to place as many families as possible in the smallest possible space: and so these housing-giants become a constructive exercise to play to increase the external surface more than the space in the plan would allow.
The windows look at and almost touch each other when they are open, between one wall and the other facing outwards only a dark and narrow space, an air conditioner at each window to fight the summer heat.
The result is austere and unsettling, and in many areas the administration has tried to promote initiatives to make the popular districts a more pleasant place. I don't know if those who live in the suburbs of Hong Kong have benefited from these proposals, but certainly the photographers who venture into these corners of the city will be happy, cheered by the facades colored by chromatic progressions that make these architectural monsters divas to be photographed.
No space is left unused: the sidewalks host markets, the ground floor of the buildings is crossed by corridors connecting one street to another, the roofs of the covered car parks become coloured basketball courts where young people in Hong Kong compete for a spot for a photo worthy of the Instagram page.
