A time-travel and memory exploration journey created by a spatially engaging installation

Derived from the Latin interstitium, from inter (“between”) + sistō (“to stand”), interstice represents “a state between spaces”. In the past few years living under the pandemic, everyone has been used to a walled habitation. Especially in dense city like Hong Kong, every one attempted to find new means of virtual spaces throughout the Covid time. We also reached out through gaps for new meanings of life or new ways of living, while bearing the already altered social forms that brought and enforced many of us some form of crevices within our memories.

INTERSTICE is a spatially engaging installation that explores the manipulation of a walled space in relation to the visitors’ memories. In a mere booth size of 2600(H) × 2500(W) × 1800(D) strictly set for the related exhibition event, O&O Studio attempted to create a short but extraordinary time-travel journey through INTERSTICE.

The installation is designed to have a single side access to facilitate an engaging walk-around journey. Internally the three side walls are lined with mirrors, with a centrally placed feature composed of optically coated acrylic panels with cut out gaps that curved and staggered around in the middle. This combination unfolds and intensifies a dynamic and an ever-changing spatial experience with the help of the light troughs and LED strips in designated locations, as well as from the surrounding environment, where the optically coated acrylic panels also created an “electrifying” visual effect.

Visitors can also rest on a revamped kid-size rocking chair for a day dreaming moment, or self-reflecting on the pandemic years. INSTERSTICE is an active space that nurtures spatial dialogues with oneself and among others. Whether wondering around or sitting within, alone or with others, a blurry boundary between the viewers and objects is created, almost like searching around in one’s memory.

INTERSTICE was designed as part of the Hong Kong Interior Design Week 2022, in which it was exhibited in the Bi-City Exhibition in Tai Kwun, Hong Kong in October 2022. Eventually, INTERSTICE was reinstalled and exhibited in the Guangzhou Design Week in March 2023.