MONUMENTALLY AUTOMATIC the FIELD
Talad Noi is one of the most charming district in Bangkok as it still remain immersed in local traditions and lifestyle despite the city’s unceasing pace of development towards modernity. The neighbourhood remains almost hidden, in between the narrow streets that intertwine with each other. This geographical conformation makes Talad Noi, one of the few places where you really dive into the small roads, discovering its treasures, walking by. The growth of “Sieng Gong” started in the aftermath of Second World War when Talad Noi was one of the very important port area for the shipments from China. Conveniently located close to Yaowarat road, known as the ChinaTown of Bangkok, Sieng Gong is a secondhand engine machine centre, a sort of urban commercial storage for re-usable industrial parts from all around the world. with just about any automobile part you can imagine laying around ready to be sawed, welded or drilled some more & installed into a waiting car. Its tiny alleys are characterised by a series of multi-generation owned and operated Chinese-Thai shops, which look like statuary rooms, apparently frozen yet relentlessly changing, where these spare functioning parts are stored and preserved before being reused. These pieces are also accumulated outside on the street, creating a landscape of heterogeneous metallic piles. The layers of these piles can be seen as the constructed timeline of the neighborhood’s history. Monumentally Automatic_the Field wants to emphasize the importance of these people, practices and places, which should be considered as identitarian for Bangkok’s past and future. If we are to continue to grow such contributions, academics, educators,architectural researchers and practitioners will have to continue to break with all types of solo thinking and instead, embrace systems thinking and take onboard the learning conditions recently described by the anthropologist Henrietta Moore: “the future learning will not be about the transferability of whole models with known outcomes, but rather about incomplete learning, experimentation and collaboration.” The first act of this projects, initiated during the BkkDW2020, ultimately aims to highlight the nature of Sieng Gong as a spontaneous cultural lab, where the sellers, by relentlessly performing their daily routines, become unconsious yet active crafters of a collective, peculiar, iconographical palimpsest.
13°44’00.5”N 100°30’46.9”E
13°44’02.6”N 100°30’45.0”E
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13°44’05.2”N 100°30’45.8”E
13°44’01.8”N 100°30’46.4”E
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13°44’03.3”N 100°30’45.9”E
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13°44’01.5”N 100°30’46.8”E
13°44’08.8”N 100°30’41.5”E
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13°44’08.0”N 100°30’45.9”E
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13°44’02.6”N 100°30’46.2”E
The order of the pictures doesn’t follow any geographical optimization. Rather, it’s composed according to visual and emotional variables. Selected spots might be far apart in the book and very close in reality. Strolling in the same alley multiple times, drifting and getting lost shape the beauty of this neighborhood.
Monumentally Automatic _The Field
Directed and curated by
Lemonot (Sabrina Morreale + Lorenzo Perri)
with
Pam Anantrungroj Nithikorn Plawan
Ph. Prin Tumsatan