Local Sensations

Opening with a quote from the architect Chatri Prakitnonthakan, “How to Design a Modern Monument That Won’t Become a Shrine”, the film offers a singular exploration of monuments in Thai society.

The essay on architecture whose quotations pepper the soundtrack of Local Sensations was initially written as a political treatise. Its author, Chatri Prakitnonthakan, sought to expose the reactionary ideology underlying most of the major construction projects initiated in Thailand after the coup d’état of 19 September 2006, and to define the contours of an aesthetic of resistance, in favour of an architecture opposed to any sign of idolatry. Local Sensations makes an inventory of a handful of these precepts (not building monuments that are too tall so as not to encourage reverence; by the same measure, ensuring that there is no flowerbed in front of a statue that encourages the public to kneel…), which he has recited by invisible choirs whose very earnest tone might suggest that the film, paradoxically, pays the kind of homage to this modernist text that it proscribes. On the contrary, each time these bubbles of discourse burst, Tulapop Saenjaroen’s dreamy eye wanders between scenes and motifs (a glassblower’s workshop, a guided tour that divulges the secrets of a tamarind tree, a strange installation of concrete music…) which, without straying away from it completely, seem to have no connection with the subject at hand. But these joyful sidesteps are not just a matter of dilettantism: we know that in order to think clearly about something, it is advisable to think about something else.

Jérôme Momcilovic