Animistic Apparatus grew out of Ingawanij’s Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship (2009–12) project on the Cold War and Thai cinema. While researching this project she developed an interest in the historical practice of itinerant, open-air film projection, whose fundamental importance in shaping film production, aesthetics and exhibition in 20th-century Thailand remains little understood. Researching this history of itinerant film projection during the Cold War, and the present-day residues of this cinematic practice, took her to the northeast of Thailand. Ingawanij and her research assistant team met and interviewed voice artists, projectionists and owners of itinerant film projection troupes in the region, creating an oral history archive of itinerant practitioners across the Cold War period and the present. Ingawanij’s journal article output, also being submitted to REF 2021, draws on this archive (‘Itinerant cinematic practices in and around Thailand during the Cold War’, Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, March 2018). An interview with projectionist and technician Kasem Khamnak, owner of the Thanawat Phappayon troupe in Udon Thani and a collaborator for Animistic Apparatus, was published in 2012 in the independent film press Caboose’s online series on film projectionists around the world, Planetary Projection.
This research encouraged Ingawanij to think about the history of this cinematic practice in Thailand and Southeast Asia beyond the established frames of commercial cinema and modern identities, and mobile cinema and state propaganda. Consequently, she focused on the emergence and proliferation during the Cold War of itinerant film projection practices as part of animistic rituals: projecting films as offerings addressed to locally sovereign spirits, approaching this practice as the historical ground for asking questions concerning cinema’s characteristics as a medium, its ontology and its heterogeneity. At the same time, Ingawanij began to see the potential for making creative connections between artists’ moving image performance and installation, and this animistic practice of itinerant film projection. She learnt from Thanawat Phappayon and other present-day film projection troupes in northeast Thailand how they have been sustaining this practice in the present, and especially how they have been handling the transition from analogue to digital projection through improvising economical, technically knowledgeable and environmentally sustainable ways of maintaining their technical apparatus, repairing and repurposing outdoor projection tools from the analogue era for present-day use across proliferating contexts of animistic rituals of film projection and audio-visual performance.
The northeastern projectionist troupes’ accumulated skills in improvising their assemblage of tools resonates with intermedial approaches prevalent in artists’ moving image practice in Southeast Asia. While the ritualistic dimension of itinerant film projection could be connected with the proposition made by leading regional art historians that the installation form predominant in Southeast Asian contemporary art reverberates with genealogies of ritual and festive forms in the region (Flores, 2018). These realisations seeded Ingawanij’s idea to design a research project on animistic cinema and contemporary Southeast Asian art, which would incorporate curatorial and interdisciplinary methods and would be driven by an experimental and media genealogical sensibility.
Ingawanij developed Animistic Apparatus during a 12-month British Academy Mid-career Fellowship, which gave her time to extend the interdisciplinary direction of her research, curate two proposed activities and publish a body of texts in the first phase of her publication plan for the project. With time to intensively study different approaches to and thematisations of animism across interrelated fields, Ingawanij was able to refine her initial idea to curate an artists’ moving image festival in northeast Thailand utilising the projection apparatus and ritualistically performative mode of itinerant film projectionists, and to organise a research network event in the UK on Southeast Asian contemporary art. Inspired by anthropological insights concerning Southeast Asian animism as improvisatory rituals of human-spirit communication and sociality, and as precarious human agential practice, Ingawanij and her team of collaborators took the project’s curatorial method in a more explicitly speculative direction.
The event in northeast Thailand became a field learning occasion culminating in a rehearsal, as if the participants were preparing audio-visual performances and moving image projections for a cinematic offering ritual. The UK event became a propositional exhibition staging encounters between Southeast Asian artists’ moving image works and historical sites across the northeast border town of Berwick-upon-Tweed. The fellowship also enabled Ingawanij to develop written work as part of the project that pivots away from conventional academic writing. Shifting to a mode of creative non-fiction, the writings published as part of this project intertwine the fictional and the poetic with the theoretical to acknowledge the centrality of storytelling for participants and mediators of animistic rituals and film projection as offerings to spirits.
With the assistance of Julian Ross (research fellow and co-curator), and Mary Pansanga (producer), Ingawanij organised an artistic field learning trip to northeast Thailand, whose film and media archaeology is linked to the development of war and media infrastructures during the Cold War, and to animistic rituals of communicating with locally sovereign spirits. An open call for participation targeting artists, creative practitioners and researchers based in Southeast Asia resulted in more than 30 people being selected to join the core team. Ingawanij established a partnership with Noir Row Art Space (Panachai Chaijirarat and Punyisa Sinraparatsamee), one of the first contemporary art initiatives in the northeastern region, to organise the trip and the rehearsal sessions with the itinerant projectionist troupe Thanawat Phappayon.
The curatorial team conceived the nocturnal learning sessions in the style of a rehearsal and a field laboratory, an occasion for interrelating different spheres of practice and expertise in the process of experimentation and improvisatory creation.
Participants approached the sessions as if they were researching and rehearsing for an animistic ritual performance that may or may not take place. For these open-air sessions the group was given permission to use the ground of a neighbourhood Buddhist temple, and an open space by the pond at Baan Chiang village, a UNESCO world heritage site.
During the sessions they improvised audio-visual, choreographic and ritualistic performances. Together they experimented with adapting some work in progress of the artists in the group, responding to the spatial, temporal and cosmological logic of the practice of animistic film projection, and learn-ing to handle the itinerant troupe’s non-standard assemblage of tools and projection apparatus in the process. See the article ‘Stories of animistic cinema’.
Ingawanij resumed her collaboration with BFMAF, one of the UK’s leading specialist festivals of artists’ moving image distinguished by an exceptionally outward-looking curatorial sensibility. She had collaborated with the festival for its 14th edition (2018), presenting a film programme on Southeast Asian moving image artists’ portrayal of forests, curated by CREAM’s British Academy-funded Visiting Fellow, Dr Graiwoot Chulphongsathorn. Working again with BFMAF on Animistic Apparatus advanced Ingawanij’s aim of establishing a strong partnership with a UK arts organisation capable of presenting Southeast Asian artists’ moving image in unconventional ways.
Ingawanij and Ross worked with BFMAF to translate the conceptual concerns of Animistic Apparatus, and aspects of the experimentation during the Udon Thani trip, into an exhibition that would situate selected Southeast Asian artists’ moving image works in the festival and in the town of Berwick-upon-Tweed, while avoiding the rhetoric of the emergent or the new discovery, which often mars exhibitions of non-western works that are rarely shown in the locality of the exhibition. This iteration of Animistic Apparatus enacted the exhibition form as a provocation: what if contemporary film screenings and installations were reimagined as if they were rituals offered and addressed to nonhuman beings? What if artists were precarious makers of offerings, rather than authors of work or producers of self-expression? What could exhibitions be if humans were situated as one of the mediating parts of the apparatus and ritual of communication with nonhuman beings, and human audiences were an incidental part of the enactment and display of art, neither invited to nor excluded from the ritual or the event?
Animistic Apparatus at BFMAF presented the works of artists Lucy Davis and the Migrant Ecologies Project, Lav Diaz, Chris Chong, Tanatchai Bandasak and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, in the forms of site-based installations, a film projection ritual and storytelling sessions. Dispersed across Berwick-upon-Tweed, the installations and performances staged an encounter between the artists’ works and the open air sites and spaces of historical sedimentation of the town. Diaz’s eight-hour epic A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery (2016) was projected through the night near the old town wall, presented as a gesture of offering to the town hosting the event, taking place under the harvest moon in the depth of nocturnal darkness of a rural place by the sea.
The night as a world of larger-than-human forces, and the potentiality of the nocturnal as the realm of the unknown, connected the presentation of the moving image works by Weerasethakul, Chong and Bandasak. Weerasethakul’s Fireworks (Archives) (2014) was installed within the dramatically enclosed chamber of the Bank Hill Ice House, a stone construction built into a hillside, used to store ice for the salmon trade during the 18th century and repurposed as a bunker during the Second World War. Shot at night during this present-day period of Thailand’s descent into dictatorship, using the ground of a nonconformist Buddhist temple in northeast Thailand dotted with strange sculptures of animal figures, Weerasethakul’s work ritualistically addresses forgotten spirits of revolutionaries and dissenters in his northeastern home region. This installation of Fireworks (Archives) further intensified its ritualistic ambience. The stone construction of the ice house brought out sonic aspects of the work not usually perceived, whose referencing of the destruction of war added another resonating dimension between work and site.
The project’s curatorial method also included commissioning a new work. Ingawanij commissioned Bandasak to make a moving image work responding to the ways in which animistic practices across Southeast Asia turn sites into sovereign terrains of local spirits. Bandasak travelled to Sam Neua in Laos to record footage of the prehistoric standing stones scattered across the highlands.
Drawing inspiration from the notion that the standing stones demarcate sacred space by casting a territorial radius, his Central Region (2019) uses the cinematic capacities of dissolves and superimpositions to transfigure the footage he had recorded into an abstract work whose shifts of rhythm, colour and light evoke the vibrating, trans-temporal quality of the standing stones as potent nonhuman beings. The work was installed in one of the town’s medieval towers, part of the defensive walls dating from the 13th century whose remains are a striking part of the town’s seafront.
The cavernous ruins of another tower hosted the installation of Camera Trap (2019). Chong’s square format video work deploys an archival process to compare historical and present-day camera use to capture and observe animals’ movements. Part of his multidisciplinary and multimedia project exploring present-day ideas of nature, and the industrial extraction of natural resources, Chong’s work uncannily juxtaposes Eadweard Muybridge’s animal motion studies with nocturnal images of wild creatures moving past, brushing against and seemingly looking directly at the camera traps placed in forests in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo.
The exhibition also presented two works by Lucy Davis, founder of the artistic research initiative Migrant Ecologies Project, whose long-term exploration of nature-culture and inter-species relations is one of the pioneering examples of environmental artistic practices in Southeast Asia. A wooden cell in Berwick’s Town Hall Old Gaol became the site for installing Jalan Jati (Teak Road, 2012), an animated fabulation of the life of a piece of teak that was turned into a bed some decades ago, which the artist found in a second-hand shop in Singapore. The work weaves the memories and speculations of experts and people with first-hand knowledge to create a cartographic tapestry placing this mundane piece of wood into much larger stories of war, colonisation, voyaging and cosmology.
Another cell hosted an iteration of the Railtrack Songmaps project, presented on this site as a sound installation with shadow puppets, wood, video and sculptural objects, an assemblage evoking the relationship between people and different species of birds along the rail tracks at Tanglin Halt, a historic quarter in Singapore undergoing urbanisation and rapid environmental change.
The eight programmes co-curated by Ingawanij and Ross explore thematics and aesthetics of animism in Southeast Asian artists’ moving image, and suggest resonances with South American works through the inclusion of some examples of the latter in the programmes.
Alliance Française Bangkok, April 21, 2019. Screening and artists’ talks featuring moving image works by international artists exploring human-nonhuman relations.
Programme 1
Recording of a Screening for a Spirit (Chao Phor Mor Din Daeng), Tanatchai Bandasak, Thailand, 2015, 3 min
Not even nothing can be free of ghosts, Rainer Kohlberger, Austria/Germany, 2016, 11 min
Field Notes, Vashti Harrison, USA, 2014, 18 min
Brouillard – passage #14, Alexandre Larose, Canada, 2014, 10 min
Mud Man (film version), Chikako Yamashiro, Japan, 2017, 26 min
Programme 2
Rei Hayama, artist talk
Programme 3
Post-Military Cinema, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Puerto Rico, 2014, 11 min
Curupira, creature of the woods, Felix Blume, France/Mexico/Brazil, 2018, 35 min
The Jungle Knows You Better Than You Do, Juanita Onzaga, Belgium/Colombia, 2016, 20 min
Could See a Puma, Eduardo Williams, Argentina, 2011, 18 min
Programme 4
Zai Tang, artist talk, representing Railtrack Songmaps by the Migrant Ecologies Project
Mud, Drones and Spirits, Aperture
Asia & Pacific Film Festival, BIMI Cinema, London, June 8, 2019. The first of two screening programmes curated for Aperture festival, featuring recent works of artists’ moving image that stage a dialogue between humans and nonhumans, and in the process questioning the assumption that humans are the only audience of cinema.
Recording of a Screening for a Spirit (Chao Phor Mor Din Daeng), Tanatchai Bandasak, Thailand 2015, 3 min
Escape Velocity II, Zai Tang and Simon Ball, Singapore, 2018, 9 min
The Knot of Meridian, Rei Hayama, Japan, 2015, 11 min
Painting with History in a Room Filled with People with Funny Names 3, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Thailand, 2015, 25 min
Between the Living and the Dead, Aperture
Asia & Pacific Film Festival, Close-Up Cinema, London, June 8, 2019. The second of two screening programmes curated for Aperture festival, featuring recent works of artists’ moving image that stage a dialogue between humans and nonhumans, and in the process questioning the assumption that humans are the only audience of cinema.
The Living Need Light, the Dead Need Music, The Propeller Group, 2014, 21 min
Our Song to War, Juanita Onzaga, 2018, 18 min
Mud Man (film version), Chikako Yamashiro, 2017, 26 min
Landscape of Spirits
Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam, September 26, 2019; Nordland kunst-og filmfagskole, Kabelvag, October 16, 2019. Screening programme curated by Ingawanij and Ross, presenting recent artists’ moving image work from Asia and South America that tells stories of relations between land, place, spirits and people.
Recording of a Screening for a Spirit (Chao Phor Mor Din Daeng), Tanatchai Bandasak, Thailand, 2015, 3 min
A Million Years, Danech San, Cambodia, 2018, 21 min
The Jungle Knows You Better Than You Do, Juanita Onzaga, Belgium/Colombia, 2016, 20 min
The Age of Anxiety, Taiki Sakpisit, Thailand, 2013, 14 min
Animistic Apparatus: Cosmos
NTT InterCommunication Center, Tokyo January 11 – March 1, 2020. A screening programme related to the exhibition Open Possibilities: There is not only one neat way to imagine our futures. Features recent moving image work by artists from Asia that tells stories of relations between land, place, spirits, technology and people.
Bilal, Bagasworo Aryaningtyas, Indonesia, 2006, 4 min
Confusion Is Next, Pathompon Mont Tesprateep, Thailand, 2018, 22 min
The Blood of Stars, Raqs Media Collective, India, 2017, 13min
Escape Velocity II, Zai Tang, Singapore, 2018, 10 min
Come to Me, Paradise, Stephanie Comilang, Canada, 2017, 25min
Detailed description of the programmes and works can be found on the project website: mayadadol.info/index.php/project/animistic-apparatus
| Creators | Ingawanij, M.A. |
|---|---|
| Description | Ingawanij won the British Academy Mid-career Fellowship to study Southeast Asian artists’ moving image within a dewesternised framework attentive to regional genealogies of medial and ritual forms. At BFMAF, Ingawanij and collaborators enacted the exhibition form as provocation: What if contemporary film exhibitions were reimagined as if they were rituals offered and addressed to nonhuman beings? The exhibition presented works by Davis, Weerasethakul, Diaz, Chong, and Tanatchai Bandasak as site-based installations and film projection ritual, staged as an encounter between the artists’ works and the open-air sites and spaces of historical sedimentation of Berwick-upon-Tweed. |
| Portfolio items | Animistic Apparatus @ Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival |
| Comedy of Entanglement: The Karrabing Film Collective | |
| Animistic Apparatus: Screening | |
| Animistic Apparatus screening programmes: Mud, Drones and Spirits; Between the Living and the Dead | |
| Animistic Apparatus screening programme: Landscape of Spirits | |
| Stories of Animistic Cinema | |
| Ghost Cinema for a Damaged World | |
| Year | 2019 |
| Publisher | University of Westminster |
| Web address (URL) | https://mayadadol.info/ |
| Keywords | Southeast Asian contemporary art, artists' moving image, animism |
| CREAM Portfolio | |
| Funder | BA (British Academy) |
| Asia-Europe Foundation (ASEF) | |
| Purin Pictures | |
| Japan Foundation | |
| Digital Object Identifier (DOI) | https://doi.org/10.34737/qy152 |