Rebranding Tamsui to Strangers

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This year, we continue to explore the theme of “strangeness,” relocating it to the old riverside town of Tamsui in New Taipei City — a perplexing site that the French philosopher Michel Foucault might have described as a “heterotopia.” 

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Through this setting, we aim to extend our previous trinity framework of place, identity, and object into a more dynamic and enigmatic real-world context for experimentation and reflection. Tamsui, a small coastal district on the western edge of Taipei, conceals within its narrow streets the genetic code of the city’s origins. It compresses centuries of Taiwanese history into a living cultural anatomy, where layers of material traces — colonial architecture, missionary legacies, riverside markets, and everyday objects — coexist vividly in the present. The town carries an unmistakable sense of both the old and the foreign, yet it is also what we might call an “archaeology of now” — a place where culture confusion in Taiwan first took root, waiting to be rediscovered through your own interpretations and expressions.

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This year the project explores urban places and their conviviality, reflecting the role of design in the material and social construction of those urban habitats, focusing on spatiality, temporality interactions, meaning, citizen engagement and social impact. How might we achieve place making through conviviality?

Conviviality in urbanism refers to the process through which inhabitants of a city enhance their control of everyday spaces through self-organized interaction and exchanges. These exchanges range from occupying spaces for conversations and moments of solidarity, to forms of interactive exchanges that could include regular street corner get togethers, spontaneous or weekly markets and temporary shops.

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