Architects Xiaoxi Chen, Lily Chishan Wong, and André Santos convene a gathering to present their work-in-progress multimedia project, Ta-Chim: Weighing a City’s Colonial Legacies, which traces the shifting political, material, and sensorial relationships between urban artifacts in Lisbon and Macao in search of postcolonial futures. “Ta-chim” translates to “balances” in Patuá, a critically endangered creole language developed in Macao, which was a Portuguese colony until 1999. The ongoing project was first exhibited at the 2025 Lisbon Architecture Triennale to ask: how does a city’s colonial legacies weigh against the seafaring rituals of homelands? Ta-Chim assembles archival images, films, performing bodies, and 3D scans to map circulations of post-colonial and diasporic matters and bodies.
