<p>這位電影製作人兼藝術家的個展正分成兩個部分在曼谷展出</p>

Max Crosbie-Jones

Apichatpong Weerasethakul 談論他參選奧斯卡金像獎的影片，以及如何在極權下創作

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	In recent years, filmmaker-artist Apichatpong Weerasethakul has distanced himself from Thailand. First he announced in 2015 that he would no longer make feature films in his homeland due to the climate of censorship under military rule (a coup d’état had taken place the previous year). Then he made his next movie in Colombia, a country he was initially drawn to on account of the qualities it shares with Thailand, among them its thick jungles, syncretic belief systems, and history of state repression.
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	This directorial gamble is now paying off: <em>Memoria</em> (2021), starring Tilda Swinton, won the Jury Prize at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival and has been selected as Colombia’s nomination for best international feature at the 2022 Oscars. Meanwhile, it looks certain that his first film shot abroad, which is also his first in a foreign language (the dialogue is a blend of Spanish and English), and the first since <em>The Adventure of Iron Pussy </em>(2003) to star professional actors, will not be the last. ‘I’m in love with Latin America in general,’ he tells me. ‘Working in a country with a similar sociopolitical history has confirmed to me that Thailand is not so special.’ After years of feeling alienated due to the dire political situation, he now feels more at peace. ‘In the past I always felt I was in the wrong country because of the dictatorship and all this nonsense,’ he says, ‘but I now realize you can never find that utopian place.’
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<p>But Weerasethakul has not given up making art in Thailand altogether, as demonstrated by 'A Minor History', a two-part exhibition at Bangkok’s 100 Tonson Foundation. Part one revolves around <em>A Minor History</em> (2021), a three-channel video installation that dramatizes an unresolved case of abduction and murder in the country’s northeast, Isan: the region where Weerasethakul grew up and which has been a source of inspiration and site of production throughout his career. Through playful spoken word voiced by a young Isan poet, Weerasethakul invokes the story of two anti-government dissidents whose mutilated bodes were found floating in the Mekong River in December 2018. The blunt trauma of this brutal episode in Thai politics is evoked by the abrasive sound design, as well as the allusive lyricism of an emotionally charged yet humorous narrative about a man and his lover strolling along the banks of the Mekong. Over 17 minutes, the real yet taboo issue of extrajudicial killings in Thailand is poetically entwined with the myth of the naga, a semidivine serpent that, Weerasethakul hints, enjoys more credence in official narratives.</p>

<p>Harris’ original montage was a composition of hundreds of photographs and newspaper clippings, many of them sourced from his 2001 photographic essay on racism in Italian soccer for <em style="background-color: initial;">The New York Times Magazine </em>(Harris previously worked as a magazine photographer), interspersed with pictures of the artist’s own earlier works and artworks from the canon, such as <strong>Gustave Courbet</strong>’s <em style="background-color: initial;">L’Origine du monde</em> (1866). Between underwear ads, a&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/6731/Jean-Michel-Basquiat">Basquiat&nbsp;</a>painting, and a McDonald’s french fries container, these elements are joined mostly in incongruity, though seen through Harris’ eye for gendered and racial subtexts: how everyone in a stadium audience is white, for instance, and if soccer resembles bullfighting, with the players more bulls than matadors.</p><p>The dense network of content is organized around a striking centerpiece: an Adidas ad showing a young Black man giving French soccer player Zinedine Zidane a pedicure. Harris had come across this picture in another experience of frisson a few years earlier, when he recognized in it an uncanny resemblance to <strong>Édouard Manet</strong>’s painting <em>Olympia </em>(1863) of a Black female servant receding into the background of a portrait of a naked white woman. The ad contains the same element of fetishization, though here of white masculinity, accompanied by an unthinking exhibition of racial disparity. In Harris’ <em>Ready-Made </em>(2001) and several other works this image is punctuated with yellow jets of dried semen – always emphasizing and complicating the tensions of racial difference and sexual sameness barely disguised in the original.&nbsp;</p>

<p>In early October, Weerasethakul screened <em>SILENCE</em> at 100 Tonson Foundation for five days, concurrent with <em>A Minor History</em>: a 21-minute installation commemorating the 45th anniversary of the 6 October 1976 massacre, when leftist protestors – mostly students from Bangkok's Thammasat University – were shot by Thai police or lynched by right-wing paramilitaries. Blending old advertising footage and poetic text with black and white archive images of mutilated corpses, this visceral work further confirms that Weerasethakul is in a reflective mood when it comes to minor histories touching on Thai macropolitics. While part one of A Minor History surveys remnants of Isan’s recent past, part two will look forward, turning its attention to the region’s youth. The artist tells me that the student-led protest movement that has intermittently rocked Thailand’s political establishment and urban centers over the past year and a half has emboldened and energized him. ‘I’m activated by the students, the younger generation,’ he says.</p>

<p>Dancehall originated in the late 1970s in Jamaica’s most marginalized spaces, particularly inner-city Kingston. Bengolea is keenly aware of her presence within these contexts in relation to cultural appropriation: ‘Only dancers from Jamaica can invent dancehall steps, but everyone can reenact them to spread their spirit. The dancers in Kingston are inclusive and great teachers, eager to share their dancehall culture with foreign dancers and to reach global recognition, often through social media.’ This, among other things, grants the genre its powerful socially transformative function. ‘It is a way of communicating deeply across levels and celebrating life and death – an infinite library of steps, like Babel.’</p><p>Transformation here also speaks to the body’s capacity to articulate sounds, move, and transcend its own matter. How did dance, choreography, and working with the body’s intelligence come to Bengolea and shape her practice? In Buenos Aires she found a teacher of anthropological dance, Guillermo Angelelli, who was affiliated with a community studying archaic ritual dances from South America and Asia. ‘I learned the dance of the wind from the Altiplano de Bolivia,’ says Bengolea. The three-rhythm dance uses hyperventilation to move at high altitudes, a technique necessary in the Bolivian high plains, which are more than 3,000 meters above sea level. ‘But Buenos Aires is at sea level, so we were hyperventilating more than expected,’ says Bengola. ‘We got into high, esoteric states of mind.’</p>

<p>Over the next 11 years, he released two films set in hospitals. <em>Syndromes and a Century</em> (2006) – parts of which were deemed too controversial to be shown in Thailand by the country’s censors – and <em>Cemetery of Splendor</em> (2015), about a group of comatose soldiers suffering from a mysterious sleeping sickness. Both melded elements of his doctor parents’ lives with a fabulist sensibility that mines Buddhist and animist beliefs. However, it was with <em>Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Live</em>s (2010) that his serene formalism, off-the-cuff dialogue, simmering political undercurrents, and shaman-like connection with Thailand’s spirit world earned him the Palme d’Or.</p><p>Like these Thailand-set films, <em>Memoria</em> is a mood piece, a floating world of feelings that transcends national borders and reverberates with a sense of geological deep time and human history. Its story, however, came from an unusual source. Typically, Weerasethakul coaxes elliptical narratives out of his non-professional actors, which are distilled during pre-production, shooting, and editing. But this time, a rare sleep disorder he has suffered in recent years, known as exploding head syndrome, led him and Swinton to invent the story of a Scottish orchidologist, Jessica, searching for the source of a strange sound she keeps hearing. ‘This sound guided me through Colombia,’ he says. A rumbling noise – brought to life by sound designer Akritchalerm Kalayanamitr – repeatedly interrupts Memoria’s otherwise tranquil veneer.</p>

<p>Throughout his career, Weerasethakul’s feature films have coexisted with other forms of art making, especially short films, video installations, photography, and books. This parallel trajectory – partly born of necessity (namely, the inherent difficulty of funding movies) and from his interest in abstract forms of expression – thematically complements his auteurship. <em>Memoria</em> is no different. 'Periphery of the Night', an exhibition of his work finishing soon at the Institut d’art contemporain in Lyon, France, has included two single-channel video works derived from images captured during the film’s production: <em>Durmiente</em> (2021) shows Swinton sleeping in a bedroom as the shadows grow longer, and <em>Memoria, Boy at Sea </em>(2017) comprises images of waves on a circular screen, over which aquatic landscapes and geometric shapes are superimposed. Future projects in Latin America will, he says, further explore his fascination with the science of consciousness and sleep.</p>

<p>Weerasethakul’s interest in testing and expanding the parameters and possibilities of traditional filmmaking can also be discerned in <em>Memoria</em>’s ambitious theatrical release plan, recently announced by US distributor Neon. The intention is to screen the film across the US one city and one cinema at a time. There will be no DVD release, nor will it be available on streaming platforms. ‘This way, the film is seen the way it’s supposed to be seen,’ he says. ‘After almost two years of not being able to sit together in the dark, it is so precious.’</p>     <div>Part one of 'A Minor History'&nbsp; at 100 Tonson Foundation runs through 26 December. Part two is scheduled to run 20 January through 10 April, 2022.&nbsp;</div>

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<p>Captions for full-bleed images, from top to bottom: 1. Still from <em>Memoria</em>, 2021. 2 and 3.&nbsp;Installation view of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's exhibition 'A Minor History', 100 Tonson Foundation, Bangkok, 2021. &copy; 100 Tonson Foundation, 2021. Photo by Supatra Srithongkum and Sutiwat Kumpai. 4. Installation view of <em>Durmiente</em> (2021) and <em>async-first light (</em>2017)&nbsp;at Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s exhibition 'Periphery of the Night',&nbsp;Institut d’art contemporain, Villeurbanne, 2021. Courtesy of Studio Hans Wilschut.&nbsp;</p>

這位電影製作人兼藝術家的個展正分成兩個部分在曼谷展出

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The artist’s two-part solo show in Bangkok is underway

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