1973, 2019
Script for the performance, projected as subtitles. Recited lines are in bold. Action being performed is signaled in brackets [ ]
[spoken]
I aspire to be Octavio Paz for Thailand.
Who else can write an anthology for their country in two hundred pages?
Who else has the right to do so?
Labyrinth of Solitude is an elegiac poem, a living philosophy dedicated to a nation but addressed to a particular.
A mass marked by the solitude of one.
I can even begin with these same words:
[focus projector onto still image of fountain]
When I arrived in the United States I lived for a while in Los Angeles,
a city inhabited by over [thousands] of persons of [Thai] origin.
I was immediately struck by the familiarity of the freeways that act as a web over the city, just like my birthplace of Bangkok, Thailand.
In Bangkok, the freeways replaced the system of water canals that used to be the main navigation routes.
What used to provide fluidity of motion and life source, is replaced by heavy monuments in concrete to progress and modernization, hailed for its congestion rather than facilitation of traffic.
Between 1960s-70s in Los Angeles, interstate freeways built in stacks, neared their completion.
The Interstate 5 was built over Hollenbeck Park,
“the prettiest park in Los Angeles”.
Unconcerned about its location, large cylinder columns supporting the freeway, plummet into the depths of the lake.
[adjust height of tripod]
And yet, life persists through its gaps, its intervals, its voids.
The sunlight would flitter through the gap between the two freeways,
drawing a straight line of light which bypasses the gated turbines,
the water from the lake, the park gates and street beyond.
What arises at that fortuitous moment when heterogeneous elements are momentarily connected?
[place captions on the right wall]
I accepted a job to make subtitles for an American-directed and-produced documentary film about slavery in the Thai fishing industry.
Since the editing crew were all English speakers, the entire rough footage has to be translated for them.
I received about two hours worth of footage of a meeting at the local NGO in preparation for the visit of the Prime Minister.
The only name that I heard was
“Lung Tu”.
I had to ask my mum on Messenger who they meant by that.
Her answer was a prompt,
“the military junta.”
On June 5th, 2019, Prayuth was elected into power by the Parliament.
My correspondence from the film, sent me a link to the live Facebook video.
The repetition of his name resonates like a swing of the guillotine each time his number goes up.
[place projector 1 and captions at a corner]
The founder of the NGO, was filmed crying during an interview after her meeting with the military junta.
[carry projector 1 and captions over projection 2]
She believes that the current government can solve the problem of the fishermen because they do not have shares in the fishing industry.
She and her colleagues joked that Prayuth should remain in power for the next five years.
After meeting him, she was convinced that power has listened and accepted their plight, that we have come to a time when those who are governing have to listen to the little people.
[move captions along gap between freeways]
I want to venture looking at history like a freeway system,
or alternatively, viewing the freeway as a monument to “the truth of history.”
The student uprising of 1973 that successfully overthrew Thailand’s military government was shut down, three years later and, look at where we are now.
On December 10th, 2018 Thailand’s National Constitutional Day,
I made a pilgrimage to the Democracy Monument on Ratchadamnoen Avenue.
None of the tourist sites mentions being able to walk up to the monument.
On the contrary, they describe it as located in the most highly dense traffic area of the city.
Further down the avenue, we encountered the memorial to the 14th of October 1973,
set in a sunken plaza on two floors, flanked by three entrances.
At the center of the memorial is a sculpture called “Stupa Saga” designed by Surojama Sethabutra.
It is an inverted cone with a transparent tip.
According to the description: “Its apex has indentation indicating a ceaseless quest for democracy.
The tip made of transparent material allows light to shine from the stupa, implying the power of democracy that is immortal.”
The inverted cone is used to illustrate Geoffrey Sonnabend’s Theory of Obliscence.
In his theory, memory is an illusion and we will inevitably forget.
The psyche is a cone intersected diagonally by the plane of experience.
Memory is constructed to preserve the self against the irretrievability of time.
[place my head in the place of Tony Leung’s silhouette head)
The passage of the plane across the cone leads to the forgetting of the experience itself.
What does an active forgetting, instead of remembering do to a nation?
When I came back to Los Angeles, in January, I went back to work for the Craft and Folk Art Museum, which was founded in 1973.
I found a book, published in 1973, in the museum’s storage room.
I was delighted to find a mention of the 1973 protest in the book:
[spoken]
“But in 1973 the regime collapsed, after its failure to put down a student revolt.”
[spoken]
The last sentence of the paragraph "The monarchy, however, survived the crisis" beckons the consideration of a continuation.
[use body to reveal text]
No matter how many dictators we may effectively get rid of, there has always been one that remains untouched.
It is not the greed of tycoons, nor the weak will of senior politicians.
It is the time-old institution and its investment in a single man.
[use head to reveal fountain]
The military serves as a veil to the true power that has maintained Thailand, a destitute and corrupted country over these years.
The role of the anthropologist, according to Claude Levi Strauss is: a “man who submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner alienation as an urban intellectual.”
On the other side of the 5, the recreation of the exotic is a double distanciation: foreign and familiar, at the same time.
The collective amnesia may be a neutralization of the real cataclysmic force that would bring a country to its destiny.
Its mirror is dredged in mud.
When it seeks out its reflection, all it is offered is the portrait of the King.
I aspire to be Octavio Paz for Thailand.
Who else can write an anthology for their country in two hundred pages?
Who else has the right to do so?
Labyrinth of Solitude is an elegiac poem, a living philosophy dedicated to a nation but addressed to a particular.
A mass marked by the solitude of one.
I can even begin with these same words:
[focus projector onto still image of fountain]
When I arrived in the United States I lived for a while in Los Angeles,
a city inhabited by over [thousands] of persons of [Thai] origin.
I was immediately struck by the familiarity of the freeways that act as a web over the city, just like my birthplace of Bangkok, Thailand.
In Bangkok, the freeways replaced the system of water canals that used to be the main navigation routes.
What used to provide fluidity of motion and life source, is replaced by heavy monuments in concrete to progress and modernization, hailed for its congestion rather than facilitation of traffic.
Between 1960s-70s in Los Angeles, interstate freeways built in stacks, neared their completion.
The Interstate 5 was built over Hollenbeck Park,
“the prettiest park in Los Angeles”.
Unconcerned about its location, large cylinder columns supporting the freeway, plummet into the depths of the lake.
[adjust height of tripod]
And yet, life persists through its gaps, its intervals, its voids.
The sunlight would flitter through the gap between the two freeways,
drawing a straight line of light which bypasses the gated turbines,
the water from the lake, the park gates and street beyond.
What arises at that fortuitous moment when heterogeneous elements are momentarily connected?
[place captions on the right wall]
I accepted a job to make subtitles for an American-directed and-produced documentary film about slavery in the Thai fishing industry.
Since the editing crew were all English speakers, the entire rough footage has to be translated for them.
I received about two hours worth of footage of a meeting at the local NGO in preparation for the visit of the Prime Minister.
The only name that I heard was
“Lung Tu”.
I had to ask my mum on Messenger who they meant by that.
Her answer was a prompt,
“the military junta.”
On June 5th, 2019, Prayuth was elected into power by the Parliament.
My correspondence from the film, sent me a link to the live Facebook video.
The repetition of his name resonates like a swing of the guillotine each time his number goes up.
[place projector 1 and captions at a corner]
The founder of the NGO, was filmed crying during an interview after her meeting with the military junta.
[carry projector 1 and captions over projection 2]
She believes that the current government can solve the problem of the fishermen because they do not have shares in the fishing industry.
She and her colleagues joked that Prayuth should remain in power for the next five years.
After meeting him, she was convinced that power has listened and accepted their plight, that we have come to a time when those who are governing have to listen to the little people.
[move captions along gap between freeways]
I want to venture looking at history like a freeway system,
or alternatively, viewing the freeway as a monument to “the truth of history.”
The student uprising of 1973 that successfully overthrew Thailand’s military government was shut down, three years later and, look at where we are now.
On December 10th, 2018 Thailand’s National Constitutional Day,
I made a pilgrimage to the Democracy Monument on Ratchadamnoen Avenue.
None of the tourist sites mentions being able to walk up to the monument.
On the contrary, they describe it as located in the most highly dense traffic area of the city.
Further down the avenue, we encountered the memorial to the 14th of October 1973,
set in a sunken plaza on two floors, flanked by three entrances.
At the center of the memorial is a sculpture called “Stupa Saga” designed by Surojama Sethabutra.
It is an inverted cone with a transparent tip.
According to the description: “Its apex has indentation indicating a ceaseless quest for democracy.
The tip made of transparent material allows light to shine from the stupa, implying the power of democracy that is immortal.”
The inverted cone is used to illustrate Geoffrey Sonnabend’s Theory of Obliscence.
In his theory, memory is an illusion and we will inevitably forget.
The psyche is a cone intersected diagonally by the plane of experience.
Memory is constructed to preserve the self against the irretrievability of time.
[place my head in the place of Tony Leung’s silhouette head)
The passage of the plane across the cone leads to the forgetting of the experience itself.
What does an active forgetting, instead of remembering do to a nation?
When I came back to Los Angeles, in January, I went back to work for the Craft and Folk Art Museum, which was founded in 1973.
I found a book, published in 1973, in the museum’s storage room.
I was delighted to find a mention of the 1973 protest in the book:
[spoken]
“But in 1973 the regime collapsed, after its failure to put down a student revolt.”
[spoken]
The last sentence of the paragraph "The monarchy, however, survived the crisis" beckons the consideration of a continuation.
[use body to reveal text]
No matter how many dictators we may effectively get rid of, there has always been one that remains untouched.
It is not the greed of tycoons, nor the weak will of senior politicians.
It is the time-old institution and its investment in a single man.
[use head to reveal fountain]
The military serves as a veil to the true power that has maintained Thailand, a destitute and corrupted country over these years.
The role of the anthropologist, according to Claude Levi Strauss is: a “man who submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner alienation as an urban intellectual.”
On the other side of the 5, the recreation of the exotic is a double distanciation: foreign and familiar, at the same time.
The collective amnesia may be a neutralization of the real cataclysmic force that would bring a country to its destiny.
Its mirror is dredged in mud.
When it seeks out its reflection, all it is offered is the portrait of the King.
