The farmhouse was saved although the whole park was turned black and filled with burnt tree stumps the morning after. We drove past spot fires for hours the following day. The smoke mixed with dust as cars drove along the dirt road out of the park. We drove past a man on a two-wheeled motorbike who had crashed. He must have seen the smoke coming, but not seen the dust cloud from the truck coming the other way. He must have been enveloped in clouds of smoke and dust. Too many things came at once, perhaps. If it was just the smoke, he could have navigated through it, or the dust, that’s fine too, but when it all comes at once sometimes people will just drive themselves off the road. In the event he had used his brake, gotten off the bike and waited for the dust to settle, I would have taken a photo of his motorbike.

Related posts:

1. Masculine fire, Superfire, Superman. “This inner, masculine fire, the object of the meditation of...
2. Fireworks         Screenshots from THIS video of the massive...
3. Walking up river Without knowing exactly how to get there, we walked towards...

A text included in the catalog of  “The Place for Socks,” an exhibition by Kain Picken at CONICAL in Melbourne. Kain is an Australian artist and co-founder of ffiXXed. The text looks at our increased movement between spaces, where “the endpoint of that movement is a human-space singularity as the spaces themselves remain the same, but our image of them converges.”

In 1993, at the NASA sponsored Vision-21 Symposium in Ohio, mathematical scientist Victor Vinge presented a paper entitled The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era ¹. Vinge expanded on an idea suggested as early as the 1950‘s ² that technology could develop fast enough to produce a technological singularity. In Vinge’s paper that singularity would produce an intelligence greater than that of humans, a change equal in significance to the “rise of human life on earth.” Vinge speculated that the internet may “run us into the singularity before anything else” and ended the paper by saying that this new intelligence may would be equal to our conception of God.

Over the past twenty years the forms this God may take were debated and written about widely (at least among Science Fiction authors), but the tendency of technology to converge and develop faster and faster has resulted in many unexpected symptoms. These effects are less fantastic than those of machine sapience or global self-aware networks, but perhaps they are already more felt in our everyday lives.

One effect is a change in our perception of the very spaces we live and work in, what we will call here ‘human-space’. The structures which make up human-space (offices, workshops, warehouses, hotels, factories, bedrooms, cubicles, compartments, studios, vehicles, planes, boats etc.) are reforming as we move between them with increasing speed. The endpoint of that movement is a human-space singularity as the spaces themselves remain the same, but our image of them converges. These spaces and contexts categorically align and become versions of each other, losing distinctions in the process. What happens next is we begin to lose something our ancestors took for granted as the most banal of rights – having sustained and meaningful relationships with human-space.

One day I will work in this little room here. Tomorrow I will fly to another city and work from a friend’s house. The day after that I will move into an apartment and work there at nights, during the day I will work from a shared office space, or the library, or a café, and during my “holiday” I will work from a waiting lounge at an airport, from a train, from a hotel room beside a beach and from a boat traveling out into the sea for as long as the wireless connection can sustain itself.

To talk about the forces causing this convergence of human-space – globalisation, internationalisation, transnationalisation – has been a cliché for some time. Unfortunately, even talking about them being a cliché is a cliché, so instead, please now think more specifically, picture your computer screen, your smart phone or your tablet. Its electronic interface is a key tool enabling movement in human-space. However, borderless working is just one example, complex economic issues (foreclosure, and unemployment being recent ones), global social trends (rising wages and concomitant changing cultural values in the developing world), and our natural mental tendency for overlooking visual complexity ³ are all facilitating a change in human-space.

In another time I may have been able to develop a gradual, time heavy relationship with the spaces I live in. Spending time in a home or office would develop a kind of spatial relationship between me and the physical structure resulting in a kind of reciprocal patina. The space acquires a character from my use of it and in turn I acquire an internal sensory map of the space as it facilitates my routines inside it, forming a huge number of associations over years and decades. Now, unable to let that relationship develop gradually I live and work in spaces for only hours, days, weeks, or months. Spaces which, while I am inside them, could be anyones and could be anywhere. They are not linked to me. The modular homes imagined by architects in the 1960‘s, where you could live in the same space, and have it transported around the world when you moved, have become abstracted. Modular housing can exist on a grand global scale, but only as a category, a mental schema.

I feel the spaces around me becoming uninhabited, even as I live in them, and I want to reverse this sensation.

The house I live in now, is between two of Tokyo’s largest rivers, the Sumida and Arakawa, in a region called Mukojima. Built sometime before World War II with a wooden frame left over from the 1923 earthquake. That small frame has since been covered in corrugated iron, which is now very rusty from the salty air blowing up from Tokyo Bay.

This area was once inhabited by the Burakumin, an ostracised group in Japan. Considered the lowest caste, the group have traditionally been forbidden to inter-marry with the general population due to their choice of work – the slaughtering of animals and tanning of leather ⁴. Buddhism and Shintoism prohibited this kind of treatment of cattle and so, to bypass that prohibition on humans, those who chose to work in such a way were considered non-human.

This area remains marked by its old non-human inhabitants. It is a deep reciprocal stain, which has allowed the area to maintain an idiosyncratic old-world charm – tourist-speak for ‘marginalized and poor.’

As I write this, I can look out and see tiny streets and other tiny houses like mine, made from old wood and flimsy pieces of corrugated iron. I can see past these old houses to large apartment blocks in the distance, always encroaching. A reminder that these special spaces will not remain special forever. The fact that I am able to live here, an immigrant from Australasia, suggests that massive change is definitely underway.

Resistance to that change takes many forms. One night, local children tore down the tree growing outside and kicked in the glass of the sliding door  –  bored little savages. A wooden board covers the hole but you can still see the smashed glass from inside as you put your shoes on in the entranceway. Every time I leave the house or come home, i’m confronted by this vandalism. A mark which says many things. It connects those children to the house, and it also connects me to it, as a foreigner who they singled out. It’s a coarse expression, but it shows I exist in the space. Without me those cracks and shards would never have existed.

That broken window suggests that marking a space can slow the pull towards a human-space singularity. It gives you the sensation of being grounded in human-space, a reciprocal bond. Of course, it is absurd to suggest that feeling of being disconnected from space itself can be resolved through broken windows and vandalism. There are many other ways to mark human-space and in fact, if you turn on your television tonight you will probably see people destroying and renovating their own homes. The western world’s obsession with do-it-yourself home construction may be the first signs that a human-space singularity is approaching. It is the manifest desire for meaningful spatial relations, in a world where space itself is losing its unique spatiality.

References

¹ Victor Vinge. ‘The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era’, in Whole Earth Catalog (1993).

² John Von Neumann.The Computer and the Brain (1958).

³ Riccardo Luccio, ‘On Prägnanz,’ in Shapes of Forms. From Gestalt Psychology and Phenomenology to Ontology and Mathematics. Edited by Liliana Albertazzi (1999).

⁴ Ann Sherif. Mirror: The Fiction and Essays of Koda Aya (1999).

Related posts:

1. Farming Gothic Text below about the f i e l d c...
2. Global human perception organ “Cyberspace, not so long ago, was a specific elsewhere, one...
3. A wooden photocopier by Himaa (Masanao Hirayama) An interview from 2010 with Japanese artist Masanao Hirayama (b....

A text for Kunstverein NY and White Zinfandel, part of curatorial project by Ashley Rawlings involving a collection of texts expanding on each entry in The Anarchist Cookbook. I wrote a religious tract about the organometallic chemical Cacodyl, listed as a dangerous gas in the Cookbook.

Related posts:

1. Cloud of Radiation 4:05pm. It snowed this morning in Osaka. Travel from Tamade...
2. 500,000 people The Sydney Biennale is finished. Over 500,000 people visited the...

A short interview published in the December, 2012 issue of Weltkunst Magazine with Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto about his large scale suspended sculptures at Espace Louis Vuitton, Tokyo.

Cameron Allan McKean: How is this new work in Espace connected to your previous installations?

Ernesto Neto: The concept of taking us off the ground is something I have been trying to do for a long time. I think the first exhibition that really took people up was at Galerie Max Hetzler in 2007, where I created a horizon to divide the gallery into two levels. To let you see the horizon from above I made some steps and there was a hole in the textile which you could push your head through. I like to create some kind of step, some kind of limit, an obstacle where you have to make a decision. Here the decision is “will I take my shoes off?”

What is the value in these types of obstacles?

For me shoes are representational of removing our limitations so we can experience space more directly. We become more comfortable and closer to the landscape. This relationship between a figure and the landscape is the base of my work.

What kind of spaces or landscapes are you intersted in?

I dont want to think about space as a void, I want to think about it in another way. Inside the device you are using to record this conversation there is a lot of circuits, relationships, elements and organs, like the space in our bodies. I’m interested, not in the gaps between these things, but what is inbetween these gaps. In between the gaps is not space, technically, it’s part of the body. Space is not about voids, but about the filling of a void.

Do you have any other examples of this space between the gaps?

Eating chilli. With chilli you can begin to feel the internal form of your mouth, you can feel the walls of this bodily room, and the walls are painted in chilli, a colour which hurts us but which shows us the form of our mouths. That relationship is a space.

How important is gravity in your work? Many of your works rely on gravity to function.

When I see this sculpture I see it as a space of things happening. This sculpture is happening here. Art occurs at these moments. It is active, it falls down and loses its form if you unhang it. It is what it is because it is action, these sculptures do not have a stable physical identity, they are in a state of life.

Christine Vendredi-Auzanneau, director at Espace Louis Vuitton, mentioned that artists commissioned to create work in this space were not encouraged to make site specific work. In your case how important was Espace as a site?

Very important, because I was doing this exhibition with hanging pieces. The space is all made from glass, has a generous ceiling and it’s on a high storey giving you the feeling of floating over the city. I thought it was a very good space for this work.

What is a key reference for you in this new work?

Philippe Petit is my hero, I think one of the centuries greatest artists. When he crossed the skyscrapers in New York on a tightrope was one of the centuries greatest masterpieces. There are so many levels of poetry to it, planning in secret, preparing the rope, and the whole network of relationships that appeared when the public became aware of him. But really, all of this only aquired meaning when he first put his feet on the rope and began walking.

But that act relied so much on risk while your spaces are often very soft and comforting. Are you interested in comfort, creating secure womb-like spaces?

Definitely. Again we are talking about space in the way which interests me, a topological space, a space of neighbourhood, a space on one skin touching another, the space of our brain.

What do you think about the space outside the window here, a busy street in downtown Tokyo?

I see a lot of people. I think urban space is a kind of jungle, whereas a beach has this voidness and emptyness. outside us now you have the street and the buildings, and people walking on the pavement. You could consider the gaps between the buildings as space, but if you consider the person walking on the ground, wherever they walk is not a void, it’s a kind of physical space. A space of relationship.

Do you feel that the landscape where you grew up, in Rio De Janeiro, directly affected your ideas about space?

There you have the infinite sea, the eternity of the mountains, and civisation is flowing between the them. I think we valourise culture too much. We live in cultural landscape but we are just a river flowing between over these older spaces. We dont even know if we will be as a civilisation in 200 years. I put my faith in nature.

Related posts:

1. Tokyo Tourist Vision Casual observations about how you see Tokyo while you walk...
2. 24 hours as a Tokyo Internet cafe refugee An article for CNN Travel about those working poor in...
3. The Home-space Singularity A text included in the catalog of  “The Place for...

Portraits of Japanese inventor Yoshiro Nakamatsu (born June 26, 1928), also known as Dr. NakaMats, inside the basement of his Tokyo compound. Published in Issue 2 of Smith Journal. 

The office of Dr. NakaMats is demarcated in a special way: painted vermillion with a gold leaf ceiling, which he claims helps him think better (this is also the reason why he made a gold plated toilet and bathroom). Along with being credited for helping invent the floppy disk (among 3000 other patented inventions) in 2005 he was awarded an IG Nobel prize “for photographing and retrospectively analyzing every meal he has consumed during a period of 34 years (and counting).” Not a Nobel Prize, an IG Nobel Prize. After talking with him for an hour, it became increasingly difficult to discern whether he was just wildly arrogant (and possibly confused) or a misunderstood comedic genius.

No related posts.

An article for Dwell Asia about the ’Reversible Destiny Lofts’ apartment complex in Mitaka, Tokyo, designed by conceptual artists Arakawa and Gins who claim the apartments have the ability to let their residents live forever.

The first building in the world constructed to extend the human lifespan indefinitely was built in 2005 in a quiet residential neighborhood of western Tokyo. Painted 14 colors, inside and out, made from jumbled geometric shapes cast in concrete and officially titled ‘Reversible Destiny Lofts Mitaka (In Memory of Helen Keller)’, the Mitaka Lofts are as radical and baffling as architecture can get. There might be more ambitious buildings in terms of size, but in terms of scope, nothing comes close. This is “architecture against death,” built by the New York based artist duo Arakawa and Gins.

It might seem like a fantastic joke, or insane hubris, but according to Momoyo Homma, the head of Arakawa and Gins ‘Architectural Body Foundation’ in Japan, the New York based architects are “very precise, clear and serious that they have found a way to live forever.” That doesn’t mean Arakawa and Gins aren’t playful though. The nine units making up the Mitaka Lofts look like a set of oversized children’s building blocks which have been interposed and cast in concrete; a red cube here, a yellow sphere there, a green box squashed in between them. But there is no mistaking the purpose behind it all, this is a “living space that can be used – and admittedly this might be difficult to believe – to reconfigure the human organism so as to extend its lifespan,” says Madeline Gins writing from New York.

Shusaku Arakawa (referred to only by his last name) and Madeline Gins met each other while they were painting fellows at the Brooklyn Museum in 1963. They would spend the next four decades in a professional and personal relationship “assessing and augmenting what goes on as human life,” says Gins. That exploration led to books such as Reversible Destiny (1997) and Making Dying Illegal (2006), along with the design of parks and residences, and most recently the Bioscleave House (Lifespan Extending Villa) on Long Island in New York. “Arakawa and I have always felt that Reversible Destiny Architecture (also known as Procedural Architecture) needs to be experienced—lived—24/7.”

Stress and weight load study by Takenaka Corporation who developed the Reversible Destiny Lofts with Arakawa and Gins.

This is where the critics, observers and writers like myself have trouble. The Mitaka Lofts require a certain level of commitment say residents, “you need to stay here to understand it,” and according to Gins it takes time to “make visible the way we think and coordinate our bodies as a means of becoming aware of how we are degrading.” Reversing destiny, both time and age, is not easily achieved. This is central to Arakawa and Gins architectural philosophy, that humans have a limited understanding of themselves as physical organisms, and that challenging, unexpected environments promote thinking and awareness.

The Mitaka Lofts are deliberately difficult — doorless, open plan, with bumpy concrete flooring, light switches too low, windows too high, and no storage space — to the point where some paid cleaners have refused to take care of the units. But it is stimulating and relaxing to be inside such an unusual space. On a tour through one of the units, Momoyo Homma recounts the time an autistic child was brought into the space and became over-excited by the colors and forms, but sitting inside the concrete sphere room he suddenly became calm. “It feels like you are being held in there,” Homma says.

Originally Arakawa wanted to have around 50 units on this site, but financial concerns limited that dream. Next he imagined selling the completed nine units to “wealthy eccentrics” but that didn’t work either. Now two units are used as the architectural offices of Arakawa and Gins in japan, two others are used for short term rentals, and the remaining five are rented to regular residents (for around ¥180,000 per month), a system which seems to work much better. The longest residents are a family of four, who’s young daughter was born shortly after they moved into the Lofts. “She became tough very quickly” the family says. They claim to have never really taken the idea of reversible destiny seriously, but that after a few months “something began to happen.” The children were happier, the parents lost weight and felt more alert. Other residents have responded differently – one gained weight because the furniture free space was so relaxing.

“Arakawa and Gins claim they are responsible only for 50% of what their buildings are. Their architecture is finished by the people who use the space, always a work in progress,” says Momoyo Homma in her ground floor unit/office. One mathematician resident used to solve his problems (and try to convince his colleagues to do the same) by lying belly down on the bumpy concrete floor. “Everyone is affected.” Even Takanaka Corporation—Japan’s largest construction company—developed a new type of concrete for the Mitaka Lofts, appropriately named ‘reverse concrete.’ Hopefully it won’t live longer than the Mitaka Lofts residents.

N.B. Throughout this article Arakawa has deliberately been referred to in the present tense. Unfortunately, he passed away at age 73 in May, 2010. Referring to Arakawa this way follows the practice of both Madeline Gins, and the Architectural Body Foundation, who have not officially recognized his death on their website. Speaking with Momoyo Homma, head of the foundation in Japan, she said “we sometimes would like to ask him for his opinion about things, but we’re not sure how to do that just at the moment.”

Related posts:

1. Not Really / Enjoy Thinking Alin Huma made a space in Tokyo, i wrote about...
2. Too Much: Magazine of Romantic Geography (Issue 1) Co-edited the first issue of TOO MUCH, featuring Japanese architecture...

Unpublished short text on Japanese artist Teppei Kaneuji. Commissioned by VICE, but the project fell through and the article was never published. Written in North Queensland, November, 2011. 

One of Teppei Kaneuji’s simpler pieces from the ‘White Discharge’ series.
2009, Plastic Chain, Pigment, Resin, 146?222?6cm

Teppei Kaneuji is a Japanese contemporary artist who, among other things, makes complex structures out of plastic objects. Teppei joins these everyday objects into latticework masses and finally douses them in thick white resin poured from a small ladder. Seeing one of these ‘White Discharge’ sculptures it is very difficult to tell what the resin is hiding—a mass of various, unknown, disparate, fractured, non-sequential things.

Born in Tokyo in 1978, Kaneuji is part of a new generation of contemporary artists in Japan whose work is interesting because it looks like contemporary art (aware of contemporary forms) but doesn’t sound much like contemporary art (unconcerned about fitting into a wider context of art making or taking part in a wider “conversation”).

When Japan’s halcyon days gave way to a harsh economic downturn in the ’90s many young Japanese artists turned inwards for inspiration, and found meaning in producing sentimental, modest, highly personal paintings. Things changed in the ’00s and young artists were re-exposed to wider forms and discourses surrounding contemporary art. Teppei is part of this shift and his work shows it, intuitively timely, visually arresting; he is one of Japan’s young plastic artists—people taking incredibly flexible approaches to art making who are also skilled at justifying their work without explicitly fitting themselves into the European/American tradition of art-making. And why should he? This is something Japan’s contemporary art is often criticised for: lacking critical rigour. But perhaps artists like Teppei represent a nascent (but valid) rebuttal?

There is something hiding under all Teppei’s paint. He says the inspiration for the ‘White Discharge’ sculptures came one day when he saw a Mercedes-Benz and “a pile of dog shit,” both covered in snow; two foreign things united under a white blanket. Perhaps it’s not meaningful to search too hard to see what’s under it all (might all turn out to be a fancy car, or even worse, faeces). However you view him, Teppei is a representative of emerging Japanese artists, and a valuable minor flash point in Japan’s love/hate relationship with contemporary art.

Related posts:

1. Discharge Something about discharge and measuring time; that we can only...
2. A wooden photocopier by Himaa (Masanao Hirayama) An interview from 2010 with Japanese artist Masanao Hirayama (b....
3. Militant vegan noise       Photos from lunch at Teppei’s house, and...

From an interview with Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul about the jungles in his films Tropical Malady, Uncle Boonmee and his Primitive series. The interview took place in Tokyo in June, 2011 and printed in Issue 2 of Too Much: Magazine of Romantic Geography.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul: I live in Changmai, it’s in the north of Thailand and I live about 30 minutes from town. Not so rural, I live in a village. Everyone knows everyone’s family but I’m a newcomer to the village. It’s very quiet, very natural. At 7pm people go to bed and it’s so quiet. But when you think about it, it’s actually not so quiet because at night it’s full of screaming birds and insects and how do you call this, a cricket? There are frogs and other things if you care to listen, but eventually you tune in with this wave of noise.

I’ve lived here for two years, before that I was in Bangkok for ten years and at the end I just couldn’t stand the city. Bangkok especially. I think it made me aggressive, the way I drive and things, and at one point I just packed my bag and without knowing exactly where I wanted to live I drove to Changmai. I drove up there and spent a month looking, and then found a house and bought it.

I liked the area I found because it had a mountain, that was the first thing. And the air is cleaner. But the most important thing is the pace of life, and the time, it is very slow. My friend from Bangkok came up and he couldn’t stand it. He was in Seven-Eleven, the convenience store, and he said “even the clerks are very slow.”  I think this matches me well. I think I prefer a very slow life; I tend to work very slowly, when I’m shooting.

It has taken me longer and longer to make films. Normally it takes me about two years to make a film, but my last film took me almost four years and I think in the future I might be taking even longer. I feel better to take my time, I’m interested in other things that can happen while I make a film — artwork that I can produce — and this way I can have less of a routine life, I feel I can control my time.

Primitives

Uncle Boonme Who Can Recall His Past Lives and the recent short films I released are part of a wide project called Primitives. This project began after I moved to my new home out of Bangkok and started shooting without really knowing what would come at the end. Along the way I produced the short films and then finally the feature, Boonmee. They all feature the Northeast of Thailand, the area where I grew up. The area I shot in is not my hometown but it is an area which has the same dialect, the same kind of roots — Khmer, Cambodian. And so the feature film is part of that. It is totally different to the short films and installations, but a kind of satellite for me. A similar but different memory.

I don’t think I will continue this style. I’d like to explore different modes which film can take. The mode I used for Boonmee was one of the ways. The next film will be about a river. Primitive proved to be a very long-term commitment.

Previous Jungles

The Jungle in Boonmee is different to the jungles in my previous films. It’s a tribute to cinematic jungles. In Boonmee each reel has a different tribute to a different genre and style; royal costume drama, or horror, or adventure films. So in the reel with the jungle, that part of the film is specifically a tribute to old horror or adventure films. It has this artificial colour, basically it’s shot using the day for night technique and shot with filters, it’s a very old style of shooting. The jungle in Boonmee is not as real as the jungle in my previous film Tropical Malady. This jungle is not real.

The jungle in Tropical Malady is alive, especially in second part of that film. The darkness is really important so we shot it at night, it reflects the mind state of the characters and the darkness also interferes with the characters, the jungle seems very menacing. But the jungle in Boonmee is just a movie prop, the sun seems like a big movie light. It’s as though I just put the camera into the set.

The jungle for me is home, to return to the jungle is a way of going back home. Uncle Boonme wants to die in the place he remembers first – a cave. So he treks to the jungle and of course both the jungle and the cave are our first homes. We are alienated to them now though, so I always take my characters back home to those places – to have them realise that is the first place. And also to realise that this is the first place for cinema too; especially in caves, the place where we used to do shadow play or draw on the stone walls.

Public Transportation and Cinema

But it doesn’t matter really what the audience takes from these films. They can interpret these things however they want. I prefer to respect the imagination of the audience. I have many references in my films because they are very personal films, but when I explain my references…for example, a guy saw Boonmee at Cannes and he liked it very much, then he saw it again in Paris and after I explained the references he said “you destroyed the film for me.” He has a different approach, a different take and when I say “this for me means this” he says “oh, I don’t want to know.” So now I feel hesitant to explain because it destroys something. Many people approach the films in two ways; either they are very conscious and make up references, or they are relaxed and open to having images and sound flowing freely to them. For these people it’s like travelling on a bus and looking out the window; it’s not intellectual, it’s sensory, just feelings.

It came from inside the Jungle

Did I say the jungle was my home? I meant something different. When I go to the jungle I actually feel alienated and scared because of the sound and the movement there. That sound you can hear in the background of Boonmee, the low rumble, is very manipulative in the way that it creates an artificiality along with the image. It’s part of this fear. Like I said, It refers back to the cinema of the past; the artificial jungles in adventure movies. It’s a rumble whose source — because of the darkness — you can’t identify. I think I reflect many people’s feelings towards the jungle, which is fear. But despite the alienation and fear, for me, it’s my desire to be near the jungle, that’s what I want to present in my films.

I think the first time I thought about the jungle like this was in 2001 when I was shooting Blissfully Yours. That movie took place in the jungle a lot and we depended on natural light.  We’d just play cards waiting for the right light. At that time I began to appreciate the jungle, watching the track of the sun; sometimes just for a few days without shooting. I appreciated the temperature and the light — how it will change the colour in the film — and when the night comes it’s something else too. So that’s why I made the jungle a main character in Tropical Malady. That first experience with the jungle came through in many other short films.

Jungle as character has many depths, I think, and also the idea of not limiting myself to a space like a square or something man-made is important. The jungle is 360 degrees, it’s a really fun and challenging space for me because you can not simply block the shot like a normal scene. Having continuity with the lighting is so difficult, matching the shadows of trees, it’s a very organic way of working.

Forgotten animal languages

I kind of idolise nature. In Tropical Malady it’s very obvious how I take advantage of the darkness. It is so dark that you cannot see anything, and your mind takes over the visuals. That’s how the jungle’s darkness possesses people. The paranormal lives within the jungle. This rural world is another reality. It’s my childhood reality. It’s a fact and when you believe in it, it becomes your reality too. Our ideas about reality, are the same as our ideas about time; our perceptions are different. Uncle Boonmee was about that, about that past, paranormal space.

For me, Boonmee is not just an allegory, these old spaces are powerful enough that they can change people who visit them. But I can’t really speak for others. I sense the power of these spaces, we used to be part of these areas. I really believe that we once understood more about what this all means; we understood birds or what certain sounds mean, or even the wind. But we lost this ability, this language; an animal language. We’ve forgotten, we’ve lost it. For me, when I was in the jungle I felt this, we felt this thing. I had a fantasy in the jungle; what would it be like to live without society’s rules, without rules about how to dress; it’s an animalistic desire, to return to a time without rules, without judgement.

Darkest shade of foliage

I think this message was more intense in Tropical Malady. At that time I was really angry, I was in a very bad shape, in terms of my mind. Because my father passed away, and the film was facing a lot of financial problems and there was the difficulty of shooting in the jungle at night. It was really like a storm for me and I reacted by being really angry and lashing out at everything. When I’m angry my energy is beyond 100% and I was really trying to capture what I felt at that moment, in the dark. I remember I kept pushing the cinematographer to go darker and darker and darker and he said “I can’t do it” but I said “just shoot it.” Of course we got many films which were entirely black, but at the same time some were also very beautiful. But you can only really see that beauty in the cinema, that space is the only way to see those small differences, little details. I think that film was really successful at bringing it out those details and ideas about the jungle. Uncle Boonmee was about different ideas.

How can a space hold onto a memory?

Spaces can do that, memories are there in the Northeast of Thailand, where there was a lot of political violence. It’s really a personal issue, you need to go there to experience the weight. But it always goes through humans. Of course when I work with the local people, they tell me things; they point to that rice field or that tree and say “this is where my grandfather was shot,” or “under that rice field they buried someone who they beheaded.” So when I am there I can sense things through the storytelling and exchanges; first hand information. At first this burden of history was too much for me. I moved on to other villages, but I couldn’t get the stories out of my mind, so I came back to this village and I said “lets work on this.” Around that time I was not really into other people’s memories, I was just into self-expression in my work. And so with second-hand memory it was something new. That’s why I lived there for several months to get my own experience and get my own memory until I could say “OK, im ready to shoot something.”

The installations from the Primitive series are coming from that real experience, but the feature film, Boonmee, comes from the little booklet I received about a man who could recall his past lives. I think they are connected in a way. People have memories that they want to forget. They want to forget the brutality, but Uncle Boonmee remembers so vividly, it’s so extremely different, so I think they are alternative takes on the Northeast, but they are the same project.

Cinema is changing, old spaces are changing too.

I think the film talks about childhood years, or childhood references. I think this film is from the point of view of a kid. It is very innocent. When people think “it’s so complicated, I don’t understand it” I say “don’t think, everything is wonder, just watch it like a kid.” Maybe that’s why there nothing really sexual in the film. Apart from the fish (who pleasures a woman). The fish was my invention, because I was referring to the royal costume drama, from Thai television. It’s not from any specific title. It was a story that involved royal family and animals that can talk, that genre still exists in Thailand, but now it has a lot of special effects. In the past it was more innocent and simple. sometimes it was just a camera trick. I really miss that, this kind of representation is disappearing and we need to present that. People like Uncle Boonme are disappearing too. Old places are also changing; caves and jungles, they’re becoming fantasies. The jungle becomes utopian space, like in Avatar, even though jungles really exist, they travel further and further away. I have a recurring dream¹ about the jungle, not inside the jungle, but above it. There is a line, like a rope, and I am walking on the rope. Walking, and below is an enormous jungle, very green. I walk above it, something is forcing me walk, and then I fall into the jungle and wake up. I’ve dreamt it two or three times. It wasn’t pleasant.

Related posts:

1. Jungle Dream Many people have written about the jungles in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s...
2. Apichatpong is a Thai video artist Phantoms of Nabua is a film by Apitchapong Weerasethakul, a...
3. Spirit of the faces Screenshots from last nights film, Victor Erice’s ‘The Spirit of...

Photo of the sun discharging light through clouds (top) and small crabs discharging sand from holes (bottom).

Related posts:

1. White Discharge by Teppei Kaneuji Unpublished short text on Japanese artist Teppei Kaneuji. Commissioned by VICE,...
2. Collecting stones by the river “I had a dream yesterday that I was trying to...