Detour Design Exhibition
Detour, an annual two-week design exhibition that is open to the public, returns to the Former Police Married Quarters this year. Suhail Stephen gets a sneak preview.
Featuring a multitude of artists and designers both local and foreign, Detour 2011, Hong Kong’s coolest design festival, will take up residence in Central from November 25 to December 11. The festival makes a triumphant return following last year’s success, which saw 50,000 visitors passing through the gates of Victoria Prison on Old Bailey Street to check out the innovations and shop for unique design products.
Originally conceived as an addendum to the Hong Kong Designer Center’s Business of Design Week (BoDW) before being inherited by Hong Kong Ambassadors of Design (HKAD) in 2008, Detour has transformed from being a guide to arts, culture and design happenings in the city into a full-fledged event intended to engage the public and promote Hong Kong’s status as a regional design and creativity hub.
Speaking about Detour’s raison d’être, Alan Lo, chairman of HKAD, says “Our idea […] is to create a street version of BoDW [and] to always gear the content to the general public—where it’s not high brow but interactive and speaks to your aunty down the street. In a subtle way, [we are] basically trying to communicate the idea that design is a part of life, not a luxury.” To this end, HKAD keeps the entirety of Detour’s activities free of charge and has chosen “Use-Less” as this year’s theme to elucidate the effects of irresponsible consumerism.
Though its major components remain the same, Detour 2011 is for the first time introducing a series of nine installations especially curated for the event by world-renowned design publication IDN.
One of the international installations is by London artist Anna Garforth, whose specialty is using unconventional materials to create typography, signage and other artwork. “It is more exciting and challenging to use materials that cannot be found in an art shop—it gets you to think in different ways. I work with what feels right at the time—be it moss, rubbish, wood or cookie dough,” Garforth says.
For her installation at Detour 2011, Garforth is creating large-scale signage out of thin plywood that she came across by chance when she saw some wood workers discarding it. “After a lot of smiles, pleading and some gold, they cut the lovely scraps into triangles for me. After lots of thinking, a modular typeface was born comprising separate triangles which, when pieced together, formed large letters,” she says.