CARCERI

CARCERI is a site-specific recital presented at Tai Kwun by pianist-composer Arthur Siyun Li. Four contemporary piano solos train their lenses on the former police compound, conjuring spiritual and spatial threads that stretch outward to loci of myths, mists, and memories: the faded mud-brick ruins of the ancient palace of Mari, in Syria; the dark, subterranean vaults of Piranesi's 'Carceri d'invenzione'; warm Venetian waterways ferrying the dead and dreaming; a church in Nevers cleaved in two, hunched inward like a bunker. The music, alternately self-effacing and magisterial, stock-still and brutally animated, is joined by an ad hoc textual projection that unfolds synchronously alongside the hour-long program. Prepared by the performer after Borges' 'House of Asterion' and Susanna Clarke's 'Piranesi', the prose maps these renderings of labyrinthine structures and their lone denizens—themselves unaware of their confinement and the artifice of their memory—to the cells and courtyards (and histories) that make up Tai Kwun. The result is an intermedial imagination of an alternate, fantastical Tai Kwun: chimeric and mercurial, plumbing the real site's relationship to Hong Kong's colonial and carceral history, architectural language, and local notions of heritage preservation and collective memory.

CARCERI is generously supported by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council, Musical Observations, Inc., and Si Wan Piano. The views and opinions expressed in this project do not represent the stand of the Hong Kong Arts Development Council.

Programme:

Morton Feldman (1926-87) - 'Palais de Mari'
André Boucourechliev (1925-97) - 'Six études d'après Piranèse'
Salvatore Sciarrino (b.1947) - 'Perduto in una città d'acque'
Hèctor Parra (b. 1976) - 'Au cœur de l'oblique'

- No age restriction.
- Event duration: 1h10m recital.