My Grandpa’s Route has been Forever Blocked

2012 - Film & Video (Film & Video)

15:49 minutes

Som Supaparinya

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The flat, wide river holds on its surface a tour-boat of memories, as Som Supaparinya documents her Grandfather’s return via cruise to familiar territories in rural Thailand that were submerged after the Thai government installed a series of dams. An unsettling sense of trauma emerges from the absence of what is being described in My Grandpa’s Route has been Forever Blocked . Supaparinya’s juxtaposition of unceasing waterways and cruise life with a series of dams, obstinately responsible for these conditions. The cruise becomes a space in-between possibility and mourning, a knowingly futile attempt to tour that which has been physically submerged from the geographic archive. Affects, strange and wistful, emerge from the displaced tourists, the dark of the river re-coordinating a memorial geography of loss for the cruise’s inhabitants, even as they generate new affinities. The dams continue their work throughout, unceasingly a-historical in their silent trace of erasure. My Grandpa’s Route has been Forever Blocked meditates on destruction through an act of burial, mediated through the ephemeral memory of the displaced. It poses no potential for return, rather suggests collectivity that sparks a profound, side-stepping energy in the face of overwhelmingly violent sources of power generation. – Authored by Theodore Lau, Asia Collection Fellow 2019.

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Humanity is not ontologically transcendent, artist Som Supaparinya’s work makes adamantly clear: actions energetically create impacts, experience dictated not only by our perceptions but equally the world that surrounds us, tethered inextricably. Transhuman in scope, probing subjects from the strange experiential dimension of wind, to Thai political corruption, Supaprinya’s films, photographs and installations engage with affective experiences that cement themselves into the complex environmental systems of our world. Supaparinya’s work is often a commentary on political, social, and personal issues. She considers and decodes public information to reveal the structures that affect us and the world we live in. Questioning how we value what is ‘natural’ or ‘man-made’; or what is ‘truth’ or ‘fiction’, her most recent projects investigate the social and environmental impact of industrial activity and, in parallel, governmental control in Thailand. Working in a wide variety of mediums including installation, photography, video and sculpture, she questions the interpretation of images, text and sound and of her own sociopolitical context.

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Colors:

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• environmental.a.02
• country.n.02
• inequality.n.01
• capitalism.n.01
• trauma.n.02
• tourism.n.01
• geography.n.01