(2-channel video—installation edition and single-channel edition)

Synopsis:

Comparing the situation in two places on the Mekong River: First, a Chinese state-owned company has sought to blast islets in the Mekong River in northern Thailand and Laos, but long-standing local opposition has halted the plan since late 2017. In southern Laos, the so-called “4,000 Islands” were modified by the French to allow passage of large ships in the late 19th century. In addition, the environment is changing due to the construction of dams, which are lessening the unique traditional fishery practice.

“Supaparinya’s interest in the ecosystem was sparked by the riverine trade route of the teakwood business in the north of Thailand.  She takes her research of the Mekong area a step further in her new work, A Separation of Sand and Islands.  For this, she was inspired by the Chiang Rai environmental activists who won their protest against China’s economic expansion through a trade route on the Mekong. The artist ponders whether a country can expand its borders driven by economics and raises questions about the balance of economy, ecology, and politics in border expansion in relation to forced migration. Supaparinya reexamines the history and the contemporary issues related to river exploration and takes another look at two rocky obstacles along the Mekong River. The first is China’s shipping expansion plan, which involves blasting islets and reefs on the Mekong (2015-2025) between Northern Thailand and Laos and is part of its plans to invent a new Silk Route to Europe through Singapore. The second is the Khone Islands (aka Si Phan Don or Four Thousand Islands) in Southern Laos, whose cascades prevented the river from being navigable by ship to China, a situation the French attempted to circumnavigate by building a bridge and a railway, giving rise to the French colonization of Indochina.   

In her two-channel video installation, Supaparinya follows the French explorers in the 19th century by using ‘A Pictorial Journey on the Mekong: Cambodia, Laos and Yunnan’, by Louis Delaporte and Francis Garnier as a reference. Supaparinya travelled to Champasak to film on location and imagined how the exploration and colonization took shape in the past. She swiftly juxtaposes that with today’s context, a new form of colonization resulting from China’s economic expansion over Southeast Asia, reminding us to consider the current border conflicts and their influence over the third countries, as well as the destruction of the eco-system. “

Grithiya Gaweewong for Gwangju Biennale Imagined Borders 2018

“Engaging closely with the campaigns of environmental activists, in her electricity generation series, Som investigates the politics, ethics, and aesthetics of infrastructural development, and particularly the construction of large-scale hydropower dams. The series bears witness to the transformation of land and riverscapes that have been irrevocably altered by the dams and their submergence zones, while at the same time, addressing the impact on communities, habitats, and ways of life that are intimately connected to the riverine environment. The deleterious effects of climate change have been exacerbated by the construction of dams in the Mekong region as a combination of rising water levels upstream and heavy rainfall during monsoons have worsened the scale and impact of seasonal flooding, increasing the risk to the lives and livelihoods of the river communities, and threatening the continued existence of its fragile ecosystems. Environmental humanities scholar, Rob Nixon, who coined the term “slow violence” in relation to the slowly unfolding, long term ecological catastrophes caused by capitalist extractivism, has written at length about the socio-cultural effects of hydropower “megadams,” which perform yet another form of erasure through the erosion of memories and deep social bonds rooted in place. He writes, “When a megadam obliterates a flood plain whose ebb and flow has shaped the agricultural, fishing, fruit and nut harvesting – and hence nutritional-rhythms of a community, it also drowns the past: the submergence zone swallows place-based connections to the dead, the dead as living presences who move among past, present, and future animating time with connective meaning.”   Local environmental activists such as the Rak Chiang Khong Conservation group and the Mekong School in Chiang Rai have argued for more than a decade that while dams produce profit for a small number of corporations, the wider social, cultural and environmental impact is devastating.”

Excerpt from “Collapsing Clouds Form Stars: a continuum of resistance in the video works of Som Supaparinya” by Philippa Lovatt

Credits

• Direct – Camera – Edit – Color: Som Supaparinya
• Associate Producer: Gridthiya Gaweewong
• Sound and still recording in Thailand: Siwat Maksuwan
• Sound recording in Laos and Cambodia: Thanathorn Passornvichan 
• Sound Design: CHALERMRAT KAWEEWATTANA
• Sound Rerecording Mixer: AKRITCHALERM KALAYANAMITR
  Navigator on Boat in Thailand: CHATID CHAB-LAM
• Navigator on Boat in Laos: KHEK
• Thanks to: 
  Niwat Roykaew
  Phairin Sohsai
  Weerachat Kaewpradit  
  Sutphuphai Wangpooklang
  Piyavit Thongsa-Ard
  Oliva Vogel 
  Pathompong Manakitsomboon
• This work is supported by MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum in Chiang Mai, Thailand