The Ocean of Memory-Our City as a Commuseum
The ferry glides by/the calm sea in port picks us up/from the youth time a half-century ago
Sheng Wu, "Youth Beach－Kaohsiung Cijin"
When people talk about Kaohsiung, they think of the surges of the sea, under which the history and culture of this port city have been developed.
The USR-C project " The City as a Commuseum-Socially Embedded Community Engagement " carried out by National Sun Yat-sen University has three main themes, which are "Landscape Sustainability", "Soundscape Festival" and "Vision Brand". Although the approaches and connotations of these three are different, they share the same intention which is to collect and collage the scattered memory pictures of this place together, and to enable the background story of Kaohsiung to be complete again after it has been renamed from ‘Takao’ 100 years ago.
Sound is one of the ways to keep memories, and music evokes general consciousness across generations. The course jointly planned by the project team and Feng Hsin Senior High School for this year was "The Golden Song of Life". Students were asked to use cassettes to record the unforgettable songs in their lives and design the cassette tape covers and compose the copywriting by themselves. Some students picked up songs of Teresa Teng, Qianyu Long, etc. which seemed not to match their ages yet what flew in the songs was actually the chattering with their grandmas. Some students recorded songs just wanting to comfort their friends who lost their loved ones.
Cassettes are items that seemed to have been extinct as time passed by because they are no longer needed by people just like any damaged objects. However, Hua-Mei Chui's "Sustainability and Social Innovation" course led students to understand the urgency of the ‘circular economy thinking’ in today’s world in an attempt to recover the original value of the objects which are to be discarded. She emphasized that before an object really loses its functionality, we actually have many ways to keep and use it.
In fact, there are quite a few things we need to keep with us such as traditional culture and skills. The project team has been cooperating with Kaohsiung Shadow Puppet Theater since 2019 to bring this folk art to the campus and facilitate its circulation among different departments of the schools. A teacher of the Department of Photonics said that it was amazing that optics could be combined with shadow puppet techniques to create effects that caught children's eyes. As for teachers and students of the Department of the Chinese Literature, they exerted their writing skills to write the script in Taiwanese for several brilliant shadow puppet plays.
Space can’t speak; otherwise, it would talk about all the stories about people from long ago. When Mei-Hsiang Wang and I-Chih Lee prepared their course "Cultural and Creative Design of Community" by taking students to community interviews, they surprisingly learned that there used to be a small zoo in Gushan Elementary School when parents of the school children told with a smile that they used to poke the lion in the cage with a broom when they did the campus cleaning.
Another surprise of this space was that there used to be a sports category of "Sumo" in the elementary school Sports Day during the Japanese occupation period. So they designed a series of games which allowed school children to recall this history sealed in dust with their muscle memories—for example, children needed to mimic the movements of animals or take turns to raise their legs and stretch their limbs like the sumo wrestlers do before the match begins.
Another question waiting for our inquiries in person was the ‘Mystery of the Island’s Change’. The "Map Archaeology × City Detective－Takao First Street" reading club included in the course of " kitin thak chheh" was designed and hosted by Kaohsiung No. 1 Community University and the project team. The participants traced the old cadastral documents and compared the past appearance to the present Cijin neighborhood changes. They also used tools for the surveying and mapping of the texture and structure of historic buildings, and expressed their sentimental appreciation of the geographical landscape in their poetry.
The effectiveness of image language is powerful. The "Illustrating with Life Stories: Picture Book Composition" course provided by Ming-Yuan Tsai and Ying-Tze Chen led students towards a journey of creation and learning about this trendy way of storytelling. They started from collecting materials and then determined themes, wrote text and drew illustrations, through which the local images and details of ordinary people's lives that were easily overlooked were reproduced in the picture books with vivid images and harmonious colors.
The project team organized many public events this year in hope that more people would join and work together for the task. People can enjoy the creative installation art of "Summer Night Light in Yancheng" displayed in Yancheng District, then step into the air-raid shelter located in the tunnel connecting to National Sun Yat-sen University to experience the "Fantasy Light and Shadow Show" presented with the Shadow Puppet Theater and light-shadow installations created by elementary and high school as well as university students. Then people are invited to a music archive full of life’s beauty and sorrow named "My! Life Golden Song" compiled by high school students in their achievement exhibition. Finally, the visitors will be directed to the "Gaps between Life and Story" section to browse through the picture books presented by earnest students.
In addition, project team members and inter-school co-training partners also visited Lanyu and Penghu to exchange ideas with local NGOs and returned youths on topics such as environmental sustainability and local revitalization.
The team has taken root in Cijin and started a series of actions since the previous project " Participatory University-Museum Partnerships ". In this context, we know that the passages of brilliance and magnificence can rarely be found on but far beneath the surface of the sea instead when we take a further look at the ocean of memory.
Therefore, we should be good at swimming and submerge ourselves in the innermost parts of serenity to catch the sinking history. This is why the team members have worked very hard to make many stories appear on the surface and have tried various ways to manifest the culture and traditions, which is the original intention of the project and also an indispensable element for a city to become great.
Sheng Wu, "Youth Beach－Kaohsiung Cijin"
When people talk about Kaohsiung, they think of the surges of the sea, under which the history and culture of this port city have been developed.
The USR-C project " The City as a Commuseum-Socially Embedded Community Engagement " carried out by National Sun Yat-sen University has three main themes, which are "Landscape Sustainability", "Soundscape Festival" and "Vision Brand". Although the approaches and connotations of these three are different, they share the same intention which is to collect and collage the scattered memory pictures of this place together, and to enable the background story of Kaohsiung to be complete again after it has been renamed from ‘Takao’ 100 years ago.
Sound is one of the ways to keep memories, and music evokes general consciousness across generations. The course jointly planned by the project team and Feng Hsin Senior High School for this year was "The Golden Song of Life". Students were asked to use cassettes to record the unforgettable songs in their lives and design the cassette tape covers and compose the copywriting by themselves. Some students picked up songs of Teresa Teng, Qianyu Long, etc. which seemed not to match their ages yet what flew in the songs was actually the chattering with their grandmas. Some students recorded songs just wanting to comfort their friends who lost their loved ones.
Cassettes are items that seemed to have been extinct as time passed by because they are no longer needed by people just like any damaged objects. However, Hua-Mei Chui's "Sustainability and Social Innovation" course led students to understand the urgency of the ‘circular economy thinking’ in today’s world in an attempt to recover the original value of the objects which are to be discarded. She emphasized that before an object really loses its functionality, we actually have many ways to keep and use it.
In fact, there are quite a few things we need to keep with us such as traditional culture and skills. The project team has been cooperating with Kaohsiung Shadow Puppet Theater since 2019 to bring this folk art to the campus and facilitate its circulation among different departments of the schools. A teacher of the Department of Photonics said that it was amazing that optics could be combined with shadow puppet techniques to create effects that caught children's eyes. As for teachers and students of the Department of the Chinese Literature, they exerted their writing skills to write the script in Taiwanese for several brilliant shadow puppet plays.
Space can’t speak; otherwise, it would talk about all the stories about people from long ago. When Mei-Hsiang Wang and I-Chih Lee prepared their course "Cultural and Creative Design of Community" by taking students to community interviews, they surprisingly learned that there used to be a small zoo in Gushan Elementary School when parents of the school children told with a smile that they used to poke the lion in the cage with a broom when they did the campus cleaning.
Another surprise of this space was that there used to be a sports category of "Sumo" in the elementary school Sports Day during the Japanese occupation period. So they designed a series of games which allowed school children to recall this history sealed in dust with their muscle memories—for example, children needed to mimic the movements of animals or take turns to raise their legs and stretch their limbs like the sumo wrestlers do before the match begins.
Another question waiting for our inquiries in person was the ‘Mystery of the Island’s Change’. The "Map Archaeology × City Detective－Takao First Street" reading club included in the course of " kitin thak chheh" was designed and hosted by Kaohsiung No. 1 Community University and the project team. The participants traced the old cadastral documents and compared the past appearance to the present Cijin neighborhood changes. They also used tools for the surveying and mapping of the texture and structure of historic buildings, and expressed their sentimental appreciation of the geographical landscape in their poetry.
The effectiveness of image language is powerful. The "Illustrating with Life Stories: Picture Book Composition" course provided by Ming-Yuan Tsai and Ying-Tze Chen led students towards a journey of creation and learning about this trendy way of storytelling. They started from collecting materials and then determined themes, wrote text and drew illustrations, through which the local images and details of ordinary people's lives that were easily overlooked were reproduced in the picture books with vivid images and harmonious colors.
The project team organized many public events this year in hope that more people would join and work together for the task. People can enjoy the creative installation art of "Summer Night Light in Yancheng" displayed in Yancheng District, then step into the air-raid shelter located in the tunnel connecting to National Sun Yat-sen University to experience the "Fantasy Light and Shadow Show" presented with the Shadow Puppet Theater and light-shadow installations created by elementary and high school as well as university students. Then people are invited to a music archive full of life’s beauty and sorrow named "My! Life Golden Song" compiled by high school students in their achievement exhibition. Finally, the visitors will be directed to the "Gaps between Life and Story" section to browse through the picture books presented by earnest students.
In addition, project team members and inter-school co-training partners also visited Lanyu and Penghu to exchange ideas with local NGOs and returned youths on topics such as environmental sustainability and local revitalization.
The team has taken root in Cijin and started a series of actions since the previous project " Participatory University-Museum Partnerships ". In this context, we know that the passages of brilliance and magnificence can rarely be found on but far beneath the surface of the sea instead when we take a further look at the ocean of memory.
Therefore, we should be good at swimming and submerge ourselves in the innermost parts of serenity to catch the sinking history. This is why the team members have worked very hard to make many stories appear on the surface and have tried various ways to manifest the culture and traditions, which is the original intention of the project and also an indispensable element for a city to become great.
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University characteristic Expansion Stage Project
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Kaohsiung City
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National Sun Yat-sen University
391votes
Further reading
Measures for Leaving a Message to Enter the Draw for the Live Streaming of the Opening Ceremony
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Event Period
From 13:00 to 14:00 on December 12 (Saturday), 2020
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Event Measures
Log in to your personal Facebook or Google account to proceed with leaving a message; each account with a successful message of #2020usrexpo left before the end of the live streaming of the opening ceremony will have an opportunity to enter the draw, and each account is restricted to winning the prize once only.
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List of Winners
On December 14 (Monday), 2020, the list of winners will be announced on the event official website https://2020usrexpo.org/) Announcement of the list of winners
Event Prize Content
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1st Prize
“Huei Yeh” Power Extreme Massage Gun 1 winner
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2nd Prize
Nestle Dolce Gusto Genio 2 1 winner
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3rd Prize
KINYO Bluetooth 5.0 Wireless Speaker 2 winner
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4th Prize
7-11 Gift Voucher valued at NT$200 27 winner
Announcement of the list of winners
The various prizes are expected to be notified via email and also announced on the event official website on December 14 (Monday), please will the prize winners pay attention to the prize-winning information, and send back the relevant documents according to the notices & explanations; no separate notification will be issued.
Notices
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