CHAPTER I - HONG KONG

In 2025 British visual artists Sandy and Peter Steel started their ‘Fragmented Cities’ project which involved riding the Hong Kong street trams at night, along the same routes - recording and documenting their numerous repeat journeys through still and moving images-with the intention to later explore if the outcome could be brought together and combined as a single, holistic, multi-layered piece that might reveal unseen perspectives of the city.

In collaboration with Hong Kong based Australian film composer Robert Ellis-Geiger, the project gradually evolved to become a psychogeographic interrogation and filmed investigation into the veracity and inconsistency of memory, accompanied by a uniquely original score and soundscape.

The multiple tram journeys have been reinvented and reimagined as having taken place on one single night time journey through several fragmented and speculative cityscapes within the same megalopolis, but with 5 distinctly different sectors—a structure evoking the architectural logic of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, where fifty disparate urban landscapes are revealed as reflections of one.

What follows could be regarded as an aide-memoire; a recollage of overlapping colliding information; a deluge of inter-related or unrelated thoughts and sensory experiences, perhaps or perhaps not from previous journeys possibly along the road toward the same destination; a vessel for Proustian reminiscence and a means to try and remember what has gone before, similar to determined attempts to retrieve a dream when first awakening, when fragments of thought are grasped at to be pieced together, before they drift away from near memory and can no longer be held in view, and are lost forever.

‘Fragmented Cities: Memories of a Possible Journey into the Night’ (2026) focusses on Hong Kong and serves as the first chapter in an ongoing, multi-city global anthology—a psychogeographic deconstruction and reimagining of the anonymised modern megalopolis through mobile image-making technology.