TEXT & PHOTO: THINGSMATTER
(For Thai, press here)
Bangkok’s streets are a parade of ephemeral details, which are the product of colliding, seemingly unrelated interests: capitalism, entropy, aestheticization, laziness, graffitist egos, official corruption, the boredom of mosai drivers, the allowable bending radius of utility lines, and so on. Every meter hosts a witty, visually striking exhibit of bizarre juxtaposition or jury-rigged ingenuity. Surfaces and objects speak to each other and the microculture around them. It’s poetry.
Yet we see people walk past, oblivious, their heads buried in phones, scrolling through intangible, irrelevant images. For Bangkok Design Week, we prepared a walking guide to the non-designed minor spectacles of Ekamai’s streetscape, in an effort to elicit mindful pedestrianism. The images here were selected from a collection of several hundred, taken in a single walk from Sukhumvit Road to Khlong Saen Saep, a few weeks ago. Take the same walk today, and you’d collect a completely different set of images.
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thingsmatter is an interdisciplinary studio led by Savinee Buranasilapin and Tom Dannecker, with a particular interest in architecture as a fine art. “Watch Your Step!”, and other works related to the tectonics and culture of street architecture are on display in their shophouse gallery on Ekamai, through February 28.