Description :
‘Mae Naam’ (แม่น้ำ) : River Her Stories
Year: 2024
คณะวิจัย
Asst Prof Dr AnoThai Nitibhon (หัวหน้าโครงการวิจัย)
Dr. Jean-David Caillouët
Claudia Militor
pantea
รายละเอียด
Waterways are the lifeblood of cities. Cities developed along rivers and on marsh lands, indeed both Bangkok and London where built in swampy river environments. Our ancestors understood the life sustaining opportunities these waters afforded, from food and sustenance source to transportation links, opening up to other countries and cultures. Today, in our hyper-built city environments, in our aim to build ourselves away from our natural environment, rivers have become dumping grounds for rubbish and sewage. The lifeblood that flows through our cities has not only become toxic to aquatic animal and plant life but also dangerous to human life. We are not so much living with nature, but against nature, where the once fruitful waters that gave us the possibility of life have turned, through our own doing, against us, bringing disease and low quality of life. What does this do to us as city dwellers, what effect does this have on our mental well-being? How can we readdress this and find a way back to the watery neural network of our cities? These are the questions that we seek to interrogate with this project.
We will do this by listening to the environment and to people from affected communities both in Bangkok and London. This will take the form of recorded conversations with affected communities and experts in water pollution as well as field-recordings in situ in Bangkok and London. The four artists involved will take this recorded material as the basis for new audio works that will reflect and comment on the situation in order to bring focus to the issues at stake and share the experience of affected communities and the state of our waterways with a wider audience.
We see a great synergy between Bangkok and London in this topic, a shared concern and a shared experience despite the geographic distance between these two cities. We believe that a coming together of artists to explore this topic will not only shine a light on the plight of our waterways and the people that live alongside them, but also bring attention to our connectedness: how we are all, no matter where we happen to live on this planet, no matter what cultural we live in or beliefs we hold, deeply connected to our environment and to each other. To celebrate this togetherness, to share, to work together, is a step towards finding ways of changing our relationship to our environment and to each other for the better.
