HOW TO NOT FORGET: IN COMMEMORATION OF THINGS PAST

Prima Jalichandra-Sakuntabhai (Prima) — My name is Prima. I’m a Thai artist based in LA. I think the question about monuments came up a lot in my work because I was looking at architecture as a vehicle for ideology: how space materializes the dominant ideology and how it exerts itself on the body. I guess it came to me because I grew up in Europe, surrounded by these commemorative monuments and the culture around it. So I’m interrogating monuments in Western culture, to begin with. But progressively as I developed my work, particularly in performance, I started to become interested in monuments that we infer meaning into and not necessarily the ones that are supported by the state. So, for instance, I do a lot of navigating myself through the city of LA, all the while thinking of different layers of histories — whether they are translated to murals that people have left here or even structures of freeways, especially the destruction of the freeways that a lot of people are talking about right now as being monuments to racial segregation. Through that research, it connected with my attempt to connect with Thai history. Therefore, I was drawn to the history of the 1973 (October 14, 1973) Uprising and how only a few physical remnants of this occurrence have left in Thailand.

Pic. 1 — 1973, a performance by Prima observing Thai political history of the student revolt in 1973.

Thanavi Chotpradit (Thanavi) — My name is Thanavi Chotpradit. I’m a lecturer of art history, specializing in modern and contemporary art in Thailand with a specific interest in politics and memory studies. I’m also a member of an editorial collective of a peer-reviewed journal Southeast of Now: Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia. My interest in monuments and the business of remembering and forgetting began with my PhD thesis in 2011. I studied the monuments and memorials built by the People’s Party and how it plays within the ideological battle between royalism and constitutionalism, which is now understood as democracy. My PhD thesis covers the period from 1932 to 1947 and 2010 when the Red Shirts held many of their political activities at the monuments built by the People’s Party. 

I also look into contemporary artworks from Thai artists who have been doing what in relation to politics. I think in the current political situation, it is interesting to observe how the practices around monuments and memory include the history of people from different periods, not limited to the People’s Party: Why do people revive them, in what form, and how they appear in the protests? It’s not being revived just to know what happened in the past, they also have something to do with the current political conflict. For example, the People’s Party became something like a forefather for Thai democracy, that’s why the Red Shirts and also people in the current protest always refer to them. Constructions like buildings, monuments, memorials, and works of art from that period are revitalized within the protest. 

There is also an emergence of monument online archives that came from people who use their phones to take pictures of the monuments, such as a record of the demolition of the Constitution Defense Monument that was distributed on the internet. So, it’s not easy to make people forget anymore. It’s not like in the past that you might burn down the books, close the libraries, tear down the monuments, and people would forget within five years or ten years. You don’t need to work at the National Archive to create an archive. You can do it on your own, in any forms of reproduction. Whether something that already disappeared like the original People’s Party Plaque, or something that still exists like the Democracy Monument; they have become cookies, pancakes, or keychains. You still need the actual authentic monuments, but there are some other things that can function in making people not to forget. As a Thai citizen, this is not a nice time but an interesting period for me.

Pic. 2 — Constitution Defense Monument was erected in 1936 to commemorate the newly established constitutional democracy after Prince Boworadet’s failed revolt. It was placed in Bang Khen District’s Lak Si Circle and later removed on 2016. In 2018, the monument was removed without notice or explanation by persons unknown

Pic. 3 — In 1936, four-and-a-half years later from the revolution in Thailand, one of the leaders of that uprising and the first post-revolution prime minister Phraya Phahol held a small ceremony, embedding the People’s Party plaque into The Grounds of the Dusit Palace where he had first announced the end of the absolute monarchy. The inscription on it read: “Here on 24 June 1932 at dawn, the People’s Party proclaimed a constitution for the country’s advancement.” 

Pic. 4 — In 2017, the plaque was removed by persons unknown and replaced with the new plaque with an inscription: “May the country of Siam prosper forever. To love and respect the Buddhist trinity, one’s own state, one’s own family, and to have a heart faithful to your monarch, will bring prosperity to the country.”

Pic. 5 — 2020 People’s Party Plaque is a new plaque to commemorate the 1932 revolution, made by the pro-democracy protesters. It was installed in the morning of September 20 on the Sanam Luang field during a protest. Part of the inscription on the plaque read: “At the dawn of Sep 20, 2020 here is where the people proclaim that this country belongs to the people,” This 2020 People’s Party Plaque was removed on September 21.

Pic. 6 — Pancake by Tokyo Hot, made into an image of 2020 People’s Party Plaque.

Prima — I really like the point you brought up, Thanavi, about how in the absence of authentic monuments, its memory of potency may be actually multiplied by digital reproductions and transformations of the object. My loose definition of monument these days is more a device that helps memory. Throughout history, a certain type of collective memory is tied to nationalism. It is used to promote the value of the state and whatever the state wants people to feel connected to. The word state is also kind of a loose term that is not tied to a specific place or culture. To the more specific case of whether it is necessary that monuments are material anymore, I guess that has been mostly how I relate to monuments in Thailand. A lot of the People’s Party monuments and architectures have already been demolished. So, I feel like the process of learning has been through looking for traces of things that no longer exist. I am starting to wonder if it’s specific to the history of Thailand because the politics have been so repressed, especially concerning the People’s Party legacy throughout the physical landscape of Thailand itself. And then on top of that, since I’m a person who relies heavily on these digital images and reproductions, I do think that it is exciting that they have become a vehicle for these memories because we might be able to infer that they would never really die.

Pic. 7 — Screenshot from Chloropsis Aurifrons Pridii, a lecture performance by Prima.

Thanavi — I think we can start with the broader terms like ‘memory’ and ‘commemoration’. Monument is one of the memory devices. It’s a construction built to commemorate something, some incidents, some people, or something that is important, or something that the nation thinks it is important for anyone to know, to remember, to hand on to other generations. The conventional way of making a monument is to build something very visible, a landmark of a city, or a spot where something happened and you want to mark the place that things happen there. Therefore, the monument is one of the many ways that makes people remember something. 

Other than monuments, there’s also a memorial. We might not talk about the People’s Party Plaque as a monument because it’s flat on the ground, not so visible, but it’s an object that commemorates something. You can build a hospital and dedicate it to a person, whatever she/he did in the past, and use the name of that person as the name of the hospital, or you put the bench in the park with the name of someone that you dedicate it to. These objects basically function as a commemorative device of the society but there are other things too. History for example, textbooks also make people not to forget something. I think for monuments, it’s very visible and materialistic, but for now, the definition of monument expands into something that is probably quite intangible. 

I also have another work that has to do with memory. It’s my research that I work with Kornkrit Jianpinidnan that was published into a photobook titled Prism of Photography: Dispersion of Knowledge and Memories of the 6th October Massacre. It’s about the memory of the 6th October Massacre, which happened in the seventies. There is a small monument of the 6th October Massacre at Thammasat University. You have to go there to see it. But in other forms, something else other than monuments, you probably don’t have to travel to the place to know about the story. To me, a monument is still important and relevant but it’s not the only way to remember.

Pic. 8 — Prism of Photography: Dispersion of Knowledge and Memories of the 6th October Massacre by Kornkrit and Thanavi.

Pic. 9 — A monument of the 6th October Massacre at Thammasat University.

Thanavi — I think it’s very fun. I have been waiting everyday for what’s going on, what comes next, what’s new on the internet today. I think maybe we can use the term ‘commemoration’ to cover everything, all these political memes that are actually on and off, or it’s online and it’s on site. There is a connection between online and offline and the amount of two practices are very high. I also see it as a resistance to the state because they have the power to demolish or to remove the monument as they have been doing for so many years now. Like in the case of the disappeared People’s Party Plaque from the The Grounds of the Dusit Palace that some people have questioned who would be responsible for it. At the same time, some people have tried to make a reproduction or a meme of those disappeared commemorated objects to make people still know about them, or even know more about them. Some people may have never heard about the People’s Party Plaque until it was removed from its place. I think it’s a good thing and it’s the way that ordinary people could resist the state’s attempt to remove these commemorative objects. It’s fun and can be very creative. It is serious but can be fun. Humor is a very important element in the protests. You have to make it fun and satirical, and this could be one of the ways to make it go viral. Mocking the monument for some people is still unacceptable, but some people start to make it speakable. That’s a good sign.

Prima — The United States isn’t’ that creative about how to save their monuments compared to people in Thailand. We are in the reverse process of taking down monuments that are related to the history of racism and white supremacy that are present in a lot of places. In LA for instance, in front of the Union Station which is the main train station, there was a statue of Junípero Serra who was the Spanish missionary basically in charge of converting the indegenous people in the area. So, there was an indegenous ceremony that happened around it and ended with the people bringing down the monument with ropes. It reminds me a lot of the early footage of the moment after the fall of the Berlin Wall when people brought down the statues of Lenin and Stalin around Russia. But, going back to the monument being saved by the internet, it makes me think of the idea of living memory and I feel the traditional sense of monuments has been so guarded by the state and removed from the people. Most of the time I feel like monuments are treated that way: they are on pedestals, they are much higher than people. You are not allowed to touch them or climb on them. Only at times of protest do people gravitate to and bring those symbols down to a more profane space and I think that the proliferation of memes seem to be invigorating those monuments with new meaning and connecting the past with the present. So that there’s no longer a difference between the two.

Pic. 10 — The statue of Junípero Serra at the Serra Father Park, Union Station, LA, CA, before being demolished. He was a Roman Catholic Spanish priest and friar of the Franciscan Order. Serra’s reputation and missionary work during the Spanish occupation have been condemned by critics, who point to mandatory conversions to Catholicism, followed by abuse of the Native American converts.

Pic. 11 — The fallen Christopher Columbus statue outside the Minnesota State Capitol after a group led by American Indian Movement members tore it down in St. Paul, Minnesota, on June 10, 2020. (See Toppling Monument, a Visual History.)

BL — I agree. To worship someone like god forbids us to criticize which indirectly repress our opinion thoroughly.

Prima — I think it’s definitely only worshipped by the people in power or the people who can find direct use of these monuments for their ideology or derive their ideology from this lineage. I think even more than in Thailand, there’s a bigger cult of worshiping monuments here because history is so scarce in the US. People are grappling for a history to claim, especially the white nationalists because they don’t really have anything to claim. This land is not theirs. They still cannot come to an understanding of that. I think it’s interesting that in the US context there is veneration for that the early foundation of the Republic and the monuments also appear as something very classical, as in representational and belonging to the same canon of European statues of men on horses but there’s also a lot of banalization of memorials.

To bring back to my interest in freeways, I recently realized that sections of freeways in LA and assuming in most US cities, are made into memorials dedicated to different people but most of them are highway officers or LAPD (LA Police Department) police chiefs. I feel like they were telling of who gets privileged in these spaces and obviously it’s seldom people with minoritarian identities. As early as the 1920s, in LA freeway projects have been used as physical barriers to segregate Black and immigrant communities from white communities. If you look at the map of LA, you would see clusters of freeways crossing the poorest neighborhoods, like the Route 110 through South Central, which is majoritarily Black; or the East LA Interstate Interchange cutting up Hispanic neighborhoods of Boyle Heights and East LA. There are no freeways crossing Beverly Hills and Santa Monica. Aside from being physical blockades, freeways bring more pollution to the air quality of these neighborhoods and are sources of noise pollution as well. Since their inception, freeways have been constructed in the interest of those in power against the dispossessed.

Pic. 13 — The East Los Angeles Interchange complex in Boyle Heights, east of Downtown Los Angeles, California, is the busiest freeway interchange in the world.

Thanavi — I think they are equally important. I mean, an actual space is still relevant. That’s why they protested at Sanam Luang, not anywhere else. Why do people always go to the Democracy Monument when they want to protest? The attempts of the state that tries everything to prevent us to go there, whether by using the Covid-19 restrictions, the Section 116 or Section 112 (lèse majesté) of the Criminal Code, or the Computer Crime Act, have proved that the actual space is still really relevant, although a virtual is also important, especially in this restricted situation. It’s on and off.

Prima — I think there is definitely something so strong about occupying physical space. And visually seeing bodies come together and taking over a space that otherwise has been presented as something that doesn’t belong to them. Or a space where you are not supposed to be. The painting of Black Lives Matter on the streets mainly happened in Washington, D.C. and in New York. I think in LA the action remained more like mass gathering. What I really enjoy learning through these marches is that different organizations have their own trajectory that they draw across the city to commemorate the fatals shot by the police. For instance, one was going through South Central which is predominantly a Black neighborhood. We walked through the main street and encountered a corner store. The leader of the march told us that the sixteen-year-old son of the store owners had been shot to death by the police. And after that we walked to the office of the mayor where speeches started to happen. I think there is something deeply physical about navigating these spaces and asking for collective memory that maybe aren’t really accessible through general mass information sources. It’s also asking people to be responsible and convey the memory of these places onward. The thing that they do a lot during these protests is asking the protestors to “Say Their Name”—that is an act of saying the names of the victims who passed away. And I think that as a commemorative practice is something very basic but also powerful in invoking the identity or personhood of the people who passed away and also recognizing their lives.

Thanavi — It has not happened yet, that’s why people still commemorate the 6th October Massacre. But it’s the right thing to do. The important step to move forward is you have to admit that you did something wrong to some people. In Thailand, the higher status you are, the more impunity you have. That’s why people are still asking for someone to take responsibility for the 6th October Massacre, to the crackdown on the Red Shirts in 2010. 

The 99 Dead performance from the protest last time (September 19, 2020) is very interesting. Using theater is another form of commemoration. It was very touching for me to see one of the volunteer performers, Phayao Akhad, who is the mother of Kamonked Akhad, the nurse who was shot to death in Wat Pathumwanaram, performed with other people. She was wearing a nurse blouse that her daughter had worn that day, and the red thing on that blouse was the real blood. She was different from other performers who wore the white t-shirts, which red powder contained in the bags on the ground would stain as blood when they perform falling. There is this one person with the real blood among others and that was really powerful. I watched the actual performance and also watched the clip. The most touching moment for me is, at one point, when they announced the names of the victims by numbers, and this ‘number 84, Miss Kamonked Akhad’, her mother who was performing her took the bag of the red powder, threw it on her forehead and failed because her daughter was actually shot into the head. How could you do that? It was very cruel and beautiful at the same time. It was painful but she did it. And the impact is nothing can be compared. That is commemoration and that is how art can contribute something. 

What I see in the current protest is the making connection to the past. Not just the People’s Party anymore. People also referred to the Red Shirts, Jit Bhumisak, Tiang Sirikhanth, those in exile in Laos, Uncle Nuamthong, and all others. Remembering those who passed away and those who are still alive but wounded have created a bond between people of different generations, different interests, different social classes. They are referred to as those who have fought before us. But what actually binds them together is a political ideology, that is democracy, that they all demand for.

Pic. 16 — 99 Dead performance poster.

Thanavi — Museums are to make people remember, but we have very few museums that talk about the recent past. We have a lot of museums about the Ayutthaya period and that’s how the state wants us to remember the glorious kingdom in the past. We don’t have a variety of museums here. And the difficult history such as the 6th October Massacre still doesn’t have a museum. There’s a ‘museum project’ about the 6th October Massacre but they don’t have an actual building to house the collection yet. They collect objects, keep them somewhere, and make exhibitions, probably every year, like now they are having it at Thammasat University. Also there is a problem with budget and maintenance, it’s not just about opening a museum, you have to run it but where are the resources?

Pic. 17 — แขวน exhibition as part of a ‘museum project’ about the 6th October Massacre. The ‘pop up’ museum has been assembled at the main conference hall at Thammasat University’s Tha Prachan campus from October 1 to 11, 2020.

Thanavi — Removing statues is something that needs so many people to engage with. Any democratic country would have people share their different views and debate. If there are people who want to remove the statue of this person because he is racist, there would also be some other people who also believe that this same person contributed something so greatly to the society so they want to keep it. For example, let’s remove this guy from this plaza but put him in the museum, of course people will still complain why does he have a place in the museum. It needs negotiation and it could be very long but that is a learning for everyone. And that’s a process of growing together in society. If you’re not going to be authoritarian, you need to listen.

Prima — I think in the specific case of the US, the thing that is frustrating for people who want to have these monuments removed is that there is not the same amount of commemorative places for people who are not white colonialists. But I’m also with you Thanavi, on this idea that it’s not about where the monument is placed or whether it’s removed or not but rather a negotiation of the actual history that those things represent and how people in America can come to an agreement of how to move forward together with all these baggages and not erasing one in order to uplift the other. Because it is all part of the history and it’s all part of the same culture and the things that have brought us to the present that we are in. But I think that there is still a lack of recognition of the contribution of immigrants and African Americans to the history of the US. That still needs to be addressed and still needs to materialize in space.

Graf — This reminds me of Alois Riegl’s distinction between ‘unintentional monument’ and ‘deliberate monument’ that Margrethe Troensegaard mentioned in her 2016’s essay What’s in a Name? Questions for a New Monument. Let me quote, “An unintentional monument could be the church built by a king in order to prove his power to his contemporaries, without deliberately planning for this to gain the status of a monument for future generations. Or it could even be a scrap of paper that later proves to be of historical importance, thus upgrading its role and value from inert matter to that of testimony or historical witness. The deliberate monument, on the other hand, is produced for the sake of being exactly and only that. In the case of the unintentional monument, it is “we modern viewers, rather than the works themselves by virtue of their original purpose [who] assign meaning and significance to a monument,” whereas in the case of the deliberate monument, the commemorative value is dictated to us by the creator. I think the meaning of the word ‘monument’ or even commemorative object is changeable now.

Prima — Just the material and financial cost of erecting monuments alone come from places that already have those resources so it’s gonna rarely be coming from the people or groups that are underrepresented. But I don’t think we need more monuments (laughter). It’s nice to have the online world that is constantly being built by multiple actors and that memes or images that would get cropped, used, utilised, reappropriated by different people and that’s how memory lives on. And maybe it is closer to how memory functions in connection with life. Some memories might surface up in a moment rather than the other because it is relevant to the present now. I’m kind of “yes!” for dematerialization of these structures of power or vehicles of power.