Open The Third Eye (2022)
moving image and Photography of my aunty ghost who always dances chachacha song
She will be a ghost who opens your third eye and welcome you to my hometown 'Salokbat, Kamphaengphet'
" Hi visitor!
I'm Thongkham!
Just a ghost in this town. I died on the night I went to a fair at Singkaram temple. I came home and got beaten to death by my drunk husband.
Besides that tragedy, I was very happy on the night I died. I danced Ramwong, a Thai folk dance, all night which made me relax from the housework.
Ramwong is my favorite thing ever since I could remember.
That night was thrilled
I think I could just dance like that forever
you guys probably haven't seen a ghost talking to you in person before
anyways, welcome to my hometown! "
"Shhhhh!
Stay silent
My sister is sleeping downstairs
Just like everyone else, she's floating towards me.
We can only meet in dreams, the deepest ones. In the cemetery of drifting dreams, I wander aimlessly. But with the sound of crickets, owls, moonlight, and the night wind that I use, you would dream about me, therefore, you could find me.
So please stay quiet, I need a moment with my sister. "
Slumber Mom (2022)
Slumber Mom is a moving image that portrays, observing my mom consciously and unconsciously sleeping, floating in a dream to see my aunty
The idea came from the story my grandma told me when
I was a kid, She told me when she was in a hospital, 2 years before she died, that I could see her in my dream because dream is a place for both humans and ghost
there's no past, present, or future; just the presence of souls staying together.
I once asked her back "Didn't dreams created by our brain when we miss someone?"
She said, "No! That's not true..."
"Dream is a special place you can live without being alive. "
Back in my hometown, there is a temple that was built in over a hundred year From an abandoned place, it has become a place of worship. People came together to build a temple.
Grandma told me that her father was the abbot who built the temple, so everyone in my family felt very bonded and had a special relationship with the temple, especially the grandmother, who always wanted to have a son because she wanted to hold the monk’s yellow robe and get to heaven I listened to these stories and remembered them since I was a child. Especially the story that my grandmother wanted me to be ordained when I turned 20, and one scary story that I remember being very afraid of.
It is about the Headless Buddha statue, with bloodstain appearing on his mouth the day after a novice disappeared. leaving only a fragment of his robe But as he grew older, those tales turned into suspicion, or was the young monk really just fleeing from here? Like me who is getting bigger day by day until my hometown can't contain me I flee to Bangkok as many people in my hometown escape from Salokbat too
The Headless Monk
and Runaway Novice (2022)
This piece is "a photograph of an actual Headless Monk and a short Doc +Moving image" which is recreated from the story that my grandma told me, It's the only story that I feel like I can connect with.
I have always been thinking about him since the day my grandma told me
And it's always stuck in my mind. From childhood until I grew up, bigger than this town. Too big that my hometown can't give me anything.
So I escaped to Bangkok, the “full of opportunities” city. created hundreds of kilometers away from my mom and dad as the night before I fled to Bangkok I also dreamed of the headless Buddha statue
But nowadays, I feel so lost. The city is so enormous but I feel so small. So small that sometimes I feel like everything here can tear me apart
This place is full of opportunities. But those opportunities were not enough for every dreamer. The areas of hope and success were limited.
Many rural kids who came here, had no choice but to fight, to survive, to succeed. They had to keep going forward, and couldn’t even choose to go back home, just to sustain a barren life in the “city of hope."
.
"Oh, it's almost morning!
Are you going to wake up?
Time for our goodbye then…
I’ll go back to dance.
will I see you again?"