ABOUT THE SIZE OF DARTFORD | DAVINA LEE | VIRGILE SIMON BERTRAND

RIBA North, 21 Mann Island, 

Liverpool, L3 1BP

The project will be released digitally across social media and screens throughout the course of the LOOK2017! festival in Liverpool.

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Drawing on personal recollections, archival materials and present day preoccupations, About the size of Dartford takes the form of a collection of visual and text fragments, signposts for the viewer as they accompany the artists on their serendipitous journey through urban Hong Kong.

Focusing in particular on urban housing, the project takes its title from the origins of the picturesquely named Choi Hung public housing estate. 'Choi hung' meaning 'rainbow' in Chinese, was built in 1959 by the colonial government to house a population of 43,720, 'about the same population of Dartford' in just 11 ultra high-density apartment blocks. Juxtaposing places and ideas, from 'rainbows' to Kent, the 'Garden of England' the project considers the distance between dreams and reality, between what people want, what they are promised and what they end up with as Hong Kong struggles to find solutions to resolve its current housing crisis.