The Dangerous Memory Machine of Apichatpong Weerasethakul

The atmosphere of ‘The Serenity of Madness’, an exhibition of works by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, is reminiscent of that which is familiar to the audience of his feature films: a ghostly and slightly eerie zone of quietude. Upon entering the exhibition space, one is immediately infected by a sense of drowsiness. This could hardly be blamed on the inadequate attention of the viewer, as one slowly realises the source of this pervasive climate as one navigates the exhibition space: in almost every subdivided area, an image of bed, sleep or dream awaits. The entire space is suffused with lethargy, which evokes the mysterious sleeping illness in Cemetery of Splendour, Apichatpong’s latest feature film.

 

A dialectic of light and darkness lures us into this dreamscape. There are the bright lightbox images Mr. Electrico (for Ray Bradbury) and Primates’ Memories that captured the flashes of fireworks, and Power Boy (Mekong), a melancholic photograph taken as the magic hour draws to a close. It shows the figure of a boy covered in glaring coloured lightbulbs, sitting by an almost completely darkened riverside. At first glance the entire show seems to be held together by a formal preoccupation, or even obsession, with light. Starting from aforementioned works, we are led on to more studies of fireworks in Teem (The Vapor of Melancholy), Fireworks series, and Ashes. Windows, on the other hand, seems to be a study of natural light in its purest form, as a television screen reflection of a quivering blue light is captured by the video camera, occasionally rippled by the movement of the artist’s body in front of the screen. In Teem and Father, natural light caresses the bodies of the artist’s loved ones, while in Haiku the sleeping bodies were completely flooded by a bright red light.

 

But a more rigorous engagement with the works would ineluctably topple the conclusion that ‘The Serenity of Madness’ is an overview of Apichatpong’s formal exercises, or a lyrical essay in the form of an exhibition written with light. The powerful visual allure of Apichatpong’s images means that they readily invite a ‘breathless appreciation’ of their aesthetic, while writings that repeatedly circulate adjectives such as dreamy, fantastic, atmospheric, mysterious etc inevitably weaves a shroud of ‘spiritual and cultural exoticism’ that prevents critical analysis of his works and practice.

 

The dreamscape in fact opens up a space in which repressed histories come back and haunt us in our dreams. In his more recent works, Apichatpong has been asking the question: what are the things that cannot be discussed in his country at this moment? The answer is often taken as the starting point of his field research and filmmaking.

 

From the Primitive Project onwards, one of his main focuses is the systematic violence committed during the Cold War era, in the name of the purge of communists. As in many East Asian regions, in Thailand the complexities of the struggle and the micro-histories of violated individuals have mostly been swept under the carpet, so long as the grand narrative prescribes that the Free World has triumphed over authoritarian regimes at the end of the Cold War. The situation in Thailand, however, is compounded by the reverence for the royal family there. Out of the great strategic importance of Thailand to the USA sprung the myth of the late King Bhumibol Adulyadej as a king who fought for freedom and resisted the evil expansion of Communism. In a country where patriotic myths are intertwined with the veneration of a king and the struggle against Communism, it is close to impossible to retrieve and retell the stories of those who suffered in the bloody repression of the so-called ‘Commies’. Yet this is precisely the task which Apichatpong has taken up.

 

In his video installation Fireworks (Archive), Apichatpong catalogues the animal sculptures at the Wat Koo Kaew temple. The sculptures were created by the temple’s founder, an eccentric individual called Luang Pu Bunleua Sulilat, according to his idiosyncratic understanding of fantasy, folk tales and political myths. Luang was later accused of being a communist and was forced into exile in the 1960s. In the video, the sculptures were lighted up by fireworks, and their shapes were in a constant flux because of the flickering light source. The fireworks lend light to a past that can only be grasped as sporadic flashes and can only be articulated as such. Meanwhile, the loud explosion of the fireworks bear an unmistakable resemblance to the sound of gunshots, inevitably bringing up a connotation of violence. With its origins in gunpowder, fireworks has warfare and violence etched onto it as a kind of birth mark. Even as a celebratory device, it was first popularised for the commemoration of military victories. History’s victors dictate the occasion of celebrations and when fireworks are fired, as well as the boundary of the respectable, the normative and the civilised. Here Walter Benjamin can be appropriately summoned: in ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, he observed that ‘there is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.’ Apichatpong appropriates a device of the victor to illuminate remnants of the loser: that which has been banished into the barbaric realm, hence unspeakable and uncommemorable.

 

Authoritarian regimes incessantly work on the erasure of past sufferings. Thongchai Winichakul, a Southeast Asian history scholar and former student activist and political prisoner in Thailand, wrote poignantly about the victims of the 1976 massacre: ‘In the name of reconciliation, the names and stories of these people have been swept under the rug… And again, reconciliation without justice is expected. Soon the lost lives and souls will become faceless names, then eventually statistics. Then their stories will be silenced too.’ The imperative to retrieve the names and stories of faceless people from under the rug is exactly what lies behind Apichatpong’s excavation of Northeast Thailand’s psychogeography. Writing in dialogue with Benjamin’s work, German theologian Johann Baptist Metz maintains that all human experiences are grounded in the narration of memories. Narrative is dangerous because by narrating systematically repressed memory, we can stand in solidarity with history’s oppressed. Fireworks, alongside Primitive Project, The Importance of Telepathy and Photophobia, can firmly be placed in the category of the dangerous memory machine.

 

In a final remark, one thing must be clarified. While Apichatpong holds a deep distrust of the ‘truths’ propagated by governmental apparatuses, he does not propose an equally homogenising counter-history that favours certain groups over others. The strategy of resistance must differ from the strategy of oppression. ‘For me, this is not rewriting history. It is documentation. We need more perspectives,’ so he remarked in an interview. While he seeks to educate himself and find out what exactly happened, he is well aware that history can only be as exact as can be seen from his vantage point. I would argue this is behind the deliberately ambiguous selection of works in ‘The Serenity of Madness’.

 

The decade after he completed Syndromes and a Century, between 2006 and 2016, saw his struggle with the authorities as a cultural worker in Thailand. It began with his co-founding of the Free Thai Cinema Movement in the wake of the censorship of Syndromes, and culminated in his announcement that Cemetery of Splendour would be the last film made in his native country. With his filmic productions so thoroughly and famously rooted in Thailand, his decision to move away must be understood as his latest and most radical political statement to date. But despite this, and his clear turn towards a sustained engagement with political issues in his practice since 2006, ‘The Serenity of Madness’ does not come across as overtly political at all. The works are an eclectic mix in terms of the media used and also the themes addressed. Works with palpable political connotations are placed alongside formal exercises and those that are entirely personal in nature. Most interestingly, Apichatpong picked a seemingly innocuous photograph from his politically charged Primitive Project, shown as the previously mentioned Haiku. The political and historical dimension of the project is almost totally subdued. The ambiguity afforded by the concoction of the public and the private renders the intention behind his works opaque, and jumbles his ‘political messages’ to make them convoluted. In the last instance, as with Benjamin, he does not view remembrance as an injunction. It is of utmost importance to avoid injecting into his art a homogenising and moralising power to aggressively alter historical memory. He must be able to make his own legends about certain stretches of land, without representing any group, region or nation.

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​(2017)