Untamed Tales of Coexistence

Type: Installation/Publication - Exhibited at Silent Green in Berlin as part of the exhibition “Cohabitation: A Manifesto for the Solidarity of Non-Humans and Humans in Urban Space”, curated by ARCH+.
Published in ARCH+ issue n. 247 04/2022
Status: completed
Year: 2021/22
Collaborators : Dew Tikumporn Panichakan.

Untamed Tales of Coexistence is a narrative “unrigorous” map aiming to describe the entangled feral ecologies of the city of Bangkok by focusing on the presence of pythons, displacing the human from its exceptionalism.

It’s a story of trash and numbers, interspecies cohabitation, organic and cultural matters, and failing infrastructures, imbricated, interlinked and intertwined.

The piece involved a situated research process: we followed urban pythons through the crack of Bangkok sewerage pipes until domestic toilets, detouring through contaminated canals, fortune tellers and lottery tickets sellers, ending up filming firefighters in their daily catches.

Untamed Tales of Coexistence is a development of the previous work “Bkk Opportunistic Ecologies”, developed in 2020 and exhibited at NTU CCA in Singapore, as part of the Exhibition “The Posthuman City”, curated by Ute Meta Bauer and Laura Miotto. It critically reflects on how storytelling techniques could communicate better awkwardly entangled ecologies, superimposing two layers of narration to describe an entangled reality, that stretches across ecological, economical and cultural matters: an overall multiscalar drawing, depicting a world through a series of encapsulated narratives without a precise hierarchy or focus, and a transversal narrative, a story, to facilitate a deeper read and a higher contextualization of the feral nature of the infrastructure of a city like Bangkok, while maintaining an immediate and inclusive engagement with the public.