Rituals on Walking
Ghost 2565: Live Without Dead Time presents "Rituals on Walking" an audio walk by Orawan Arunrak
Growing up around Hua Lamphong, the terminal station of Bangkok’s first railway line, Arunrak has seen not only the migration of people, among them her parents and other family, but also of time. The station is one where lives intersect through the interest of survival, of moving into the center of Bangkok looking for a job or how modernity is prescribed onto neighboring provinces and other regions, an interchange of leaving and returning. Repetitive days and routines of those around the station seem stable, contained in the cycle of survival. The station itself is now on its last leg, ceasing operations and turning into either a museum or a mall. The commissioned piece, Rituals on Walking invites registered participants on a guided audio walk around Hua Lamphong station. A recollection of sights, sounds, and scents that took hold in the artist’s memory finds form in a walk that invites us to follow intersecting lives, their scents and tastes and alphabets. The choreographed journey through the artist’s archive of her formative neighborhood is an antidote to the increasing divorce of the body from the city and the urban compression of time and space. The gap between what you see and what you hear becomes a trigger to reclaim our senses. As her practice urges a reconsideration of the body as extended outward, grafted onto our surroundings and redefined, this walk becomes a mode of forming relationships amidst isolation, to your senses, history, and memories.
"A performance outfit identical to the one my mother wore while selling food and drinks on the train at Hua Lamphong Station."
"An excerpt from my writing on the audio walk."
Audio Walk NO.B2
Living with the Alphabets
Voice in Thai by my father. Voice in English by me.
Symbols in place of sounds
Record
Remember
Relay
A book gathers words
Words align into sentences
Together in a group, a pile, a chunk of books
In the pile of books are many stories
Many languages. Many images.
There are stories. Knowledge. No knowledge.
There are shared history heaped together
Books. Magazines. Publications.
Are shared results of many people.
Many machines
Many pages
Many languages
In ten years, almost twenty years, ago
Old bookstores, the temporary ones
Piles of books are placed after midnight, and collected before dawn
Paper pages are sifted through. Page by page. Without natural light.
Temporary piles of books. Placed and piled temporarily.
In front of the shop 7-11
24 hours service
Open all day. Open everyday.
Open all the time.
The old bookstore’s shopkeeper used the light from 7-11
For the convenience of the readers
Bright light that never blows. 24 hours.
Air-conditioning breeze flows with the number of customers
Today there’s still light at 7
Light that’s too bright
Renders smaller shops
….blind
Light with less bargaining power
Is hard to try to see
And rarely do people see
It will bounceand fade away
Words separate
Stories scatter
Lost or collected
Daily news
Newspaper
Is a packaging material
Is a paper mat
Messages communicated through ink can melt
Unless we try to use memory instead of ink
Against a light so strong
Commissioned by Ghost Foundation, Bangkok.
Ghost is a video and performance art series that takes place in Bangkok, Thailand. Following Ghost:2561 (October 11–28, 2018) curated by co-founder Korakrit Arunanondchai, the second edition Ghost 2565: Live Without Dead Time curated by Christina Li takes place from October 12 to November 13, 2022 in venues throughout Bangkok.