Project name: Local Studio, Buffalo Field Festival 2019
Funder/Sponsor: Self-funded / Arizona State University / Urban Futures & Policy
Collaborators: E-Lerng artists group; Mike Hornblow; International artists; Arizona State University; Urban Futures & Policy; University of New South Wales; University of Tasmania; Local participants
Year: 2019
Project type: Workshop; Art; Performance; Embodied Movement; Community Development; Community Festival
Background
Local Studio was the first part of the 2019 Buffalo Field Festival. The four-day studio connected academics from Thailand, Australia and the United States with the local community in Nang Lerng, and served to provide context, content and material resources to the performing artists and for future collaborations with the community.
The studio premise
Local studio was a link between Openspace’s long standing work in Nang Lerng and our strong relationship with the community, with the more international feel of the festival. The studio was facilitated by Ploy Yamtree of Openspace: Mike Hornblow – an artist/academic from Australia and the Buffalo Field Festival artistic director; Dang Suwan Welployngam and Nammon Welployngam – community leaders and organisers from Nang Lerng; Assistant Professor Ann Marome Wijitbusaba and Assistant Professor Pan Boonanan Natakun from Thammasat University in Bangkok. We were also joined by international academics: Assistant Professor Adam Nocek from Arizona State University in the United States; Professor Stephen Loo from the University of New South Wales; and Professor Julian Worrall from the University of Tasmania in Australia.
Leading up to the studio, we held meetings with community organisers, the team at Openspace and Mike Hornblow to come up with the themes and format of the studio. We wanted the themes to resonate with the local reality in Nang Lerng and also provide a wide scope for our exploration of the area. In the end, we developed three main themes – sustenance, settlement, social fabric – which then evolved into three working groups that explored them through their work in the community.
The sustenance group
~ food security, urban farming, hospitality
While Nang Lerng is famous for its market and local specialities, the reality for many of its inhabitants is in stark contrast. While an increasing number of outsiders visit the community to try their famous food, many locals struggle to feed themselves and their families, often depending on food donations from the Wat Care Nang Lerng temple.
In the studio, the sustenance group focused on three activities:
Mapping edible garden corners within the community
Creating a garden bed using discarded soda bottles
Creating a mobile edible garden from wine bottles from Bo.lan restaurant which cannot be melted in Thailand – and are hence very wasteful
To map the edible garden corners, we asked two questions: what do you want to grow and why? The most common reasons to grow plants were good fortune, appreciation and beautification, eating and to use as medicine.
The garden bed was created using only discarded elements, making it fully upcycled: empty soda bottles to make the sides, cut-off bamboo pieces from a construction site to make the frame, old tyres to make the ties and old t-shirts to make the bed. While the soda bottle garden bed is at the front of a house, as a private space, the owner also wants it to be a communal space, with everyone helping out to take care of the plants.
Lastly, in the process of making the mobile edible garden, we used it as a moving ideas space to ask community members two questions: what would you like to grow, if there is a community garden space on a cart like this, and what is food security in Nang Lerng? We took the cart around the community and got input from as many people as we could, who wrote their answers on paper flags. Their answers served as our blueprint to build the mobile garden using empty wine bottles, pieces of bamboo and old tyres – and to grow the plants they wished to have.
These three interventions highlighted easy and cheap solutions to food insecurity that can happen within Nang Lerng. Price and availability of space are often deterrents for gardening and we sought to emphasise that they are not necessarily restrictions.
The settlement group
~ gentrification, insecure tenure, upgrading, restoration, reuse, adaptation
As with most informal settlements in Bangkok, the inhabitants of Nang Lerng live with the looming threat of eviction, as the city grows and often develops without them. Yet the community has a distinct local colour but one that is vulnerable to gentrification.
During the studio, this group developed what we called the Settlement Game. Games can be very powerful in creating horizontal discussions on sensitive issues, as well as allowing a non-threatening space for people to share their issues and dreams with outsiders. The game is based on a design game process developed by Mike Hornblow’s colleague, Professor Ceridwen Owen at the University Tasmania (from her work with Kim Dovey and Wiryono Raharjo; see "Teaching Informal Urbanism: Simulating Informal Settlement Practices in the Design Studio", 2013). The original game uses a Kampung community in Yogyakarta Indonesia as its basis, which was adapted to Nang Lerng. The group started with a mapping exercise to map the important spots in the community – as they are now, as well as 50, 100 and 150 years ago, as a way of decoding the community’s history.
We organised a street event with Gandhi Wasuvitchayagit - a Thai sound artist - using the bottles from the old clinic in Nang Lerng. We asked residents “What do you think we need to take care of in the community? and What needs to be healed?"; they wrote their answer onto the bottles, which they also used to make sound. Gandhi looped the sounds, reprocessed them and played them back live as we moved around the community.
We created the rules of the game by deciding what threats the community faced and creating challenge cards to represent these. We also created dream cards to reflect the types of spaces that they wished to see in their community, based on the answers residents wrote on the bottles. The level of difficulty in the game depends on the number or types of assets included, so can be adapted during the process.
As a final stage, we once again engaged with the community by organising a game test on Paniang street – a gathering space for many Nang lerng locals. The game turned out to be fun and full of interesting stories from local people of different ages.
The social fabric group
~ livelihood, inclusion, cultural memory, community expertise
At its core, the social fabric group recognises that people are the experts of their own community. Local knowledge, heritage and culture are often looked down upon as useless. To flip this narrative, we looked for ‘local experts’ within Nang Lerng, specifically a barber, a tailor, a butcher, a bike repairer and a luggage repairer – to show that the people living on site actually know best.
During the studio, Nammon, a community member and artist, worked with participants to map the local experts and created design drawings of the inside of their shophouses. The local experts then engaged with studio participants and artists, by opening their shops and offering their tools as props to performers during the festival – knives from the butcher, sewing machines from the tailor, bike repair tools, scissors for cutting hair from the barber, etc.
Studio debrief
Once the Local Studio finished, the three groups continued working on different outputs and pilot projects. We organised a studio debrief two days before the start of the festival, with the local community and community organisers, the local authority, Buffalo Field artists, academics and the studio participants. We shared the process, findings and outputs and opened the floor for discussion. The debrief also served to ground the artists into the local reality of Nang Lerng – helping them make their performances more relevant and site-specific.
