Bangkok International Performing Arts Meeting (Bipam), in collaboration with Festival/Tokyo (F/T) is staging a unique exhibition as part of "The City & The City 2020 Edition: Divided Senses", which runs from Thursday to Nov 14 at The Jam Factory.
The project is a collaborative initiative for select artists from Bangkok and Tokyo to research about their own respective cities and exchange ideas and collaborate through digital platforms.
Each artist began by finding five unique senses present in their city and then had to try to figure out how to "translate" and "deliver" them digitally to artists in the other city in order to co-create artistic results.
This exhibition is the fruit of their multidisciplinary, international/intercity and exclusively online process of artistic experiment.
Artists selected by F/T to participate in the project in Tokyo were actress and dramaturge Chisato Sone; architect and scenographer Watanabe Shikine; plus director and lighting and sound designer Sakurauchi Shoumi.
In Bangkok, Bipam selected from a pool of emerging artists from wide creative practices. They included Chatchavan Suwansawat, an architect and writer whose book Architect-jer (What An Architect Comes Across) was recently launched at Book Expo Thailand 2020; Chanapon Komkham, a visual artist working across multiple disciplines; and Pakhamon Hemachandra, a contemporary dancer with interest in multidisciplinary work.
"The City & The City 2020 Edition: Divided Senses" project Courtesy of Bangkok International Performing Arts Meeting (BIPAM)
Piyawan Sapsamreom used her prowess as a Thai-Japanese interpreter to bridge the language barrier between the two groups of artists.
With current restrictions on international travel, the project turned limitations into an artistic framework of teamwork. Throughout the project, both the Bangkok and Tokyo team of artists met and exchanged ideas completely via online platforms only.
Needless to say, the artists were challenged to work with limited means of communication and differences in language and culture. Their conclusion of the five senses of the cities in Phase 1 of the process was consequently arrived at through different perceptions and processes, which, in turn, were exchanged and applied by each team to re-discover their own city in Phase 2.
For more information and the latest updates on the exhibition, visit facebook.com/TheJamFactoryBangkok.
