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 by Kok Meng Tan |
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The word gets around that Cities on the Move came to Bangkok.... | ||||
Through an interview at the About CafÈ and with the privilege of a manifesto-like text titled "2542: Bangkok, City in the Future" (published in ART4d, September 1999), Scheeren carefully constructed for us the conceptual framework and structure behind the version of Cities on the Move in Bangkok. While its previous incarnations in Western cities presented an almost celebratory story of little-known modernising 'Asia' to the western world, meant to give an alternative reality to cliched exotic projections, the Bangkok one would instead try to concentrate on how the works are shown; how the works negotiate the site. The entire city would now work as an exhibition space - with no one single self-contained venue. Rather, there would be eight main venues and other temporary ones, that would become sites of interaction between the city and the works. Aspects of Bangkok - the uncontrollability of its scale and sense of time that is likened to a constantly extending, shifting, mutating organism, a giant urban naga with multiple tentacles, are reworked as concepts to reframe the exhibitions as similarly time-related event structures. Thus the city becomes a kind of hyper-structure that connects the works together. The interaction or the interchangeability, and confusion of identities between the city and the exhibition is perhaps the ultimate agenda of the show. Admits Scheeren at the beginning of his "2542", "... this might be an attempt to describe the city through the structure of the an exhibition - or maybe vice versa..." What to the western calendar is 1999 is equivalent to the Buddhist calendar in the year 2542. In a play of a simultaneous occurrence of two parallel universes, present-day Bangkok is interpreted as the prototype of the future (Asian) city. "The way to perceive Bangkok might need to be re-considered drastically: ä the city reveals multi-layered structure of complexity and hyper potentiality." With this marvellous 'discovery', Scheeren's text sets out to read the existing urban phenomenon of Bangkok as a pro-active manifesto, a tribute perhaps, to Koolhaas' retroactive manifesto in Delirious New York. With such a reading, the city of Bangkok suddenly becomes the wellspring of such wonderful urban strategies: traffic snarls become ZONES OF CONGESTION; mimicry of magazine architecture images in buildings become a MOBILE STRATEGY to relocate entire cities; the over indulgence of air-conditioning turn interiorised urban spaces into calculated ATMOSPHERES. But then again, it could be any other Asian city. Notwithstanding, the point is made: that the exhibition should work with the existing local structures and systems. The desperate lack of funds also demanded that the local artistic and architectural communities were sought to help organise and put up the show. This, Scheeren lets us know, is another level of interaction that the show and its works would bring to the city. Turning a problem into an opportunity, together with local architects and lecturers, he improvised workshops with architectural students from Silpakorn University, to design the exhibition at Tadu Gallery for instance. This is realisable only; he stressed, because of the inherent flexibility in the Thai undergraduate curriculum. |
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