Floodplain (126)
Floodplain (126) reimagines the ruined city of Wiang Kum Kam through the lens of its moment of collapse, when the Ping River changed course and caused the severe flooding that eventually led to the city’s abandonment over seven hundred years ago. I am interested in how the residual memory of catastrophic natural disasters intersects with the built environment, both past and present. The ruin is suspended in time, physically existing in the present, but perpetually tied to the past, serving as a visual representation of the relentless persistence of time. In my installation, I attempt to excavate and merge the remnants of memory that haunt this site by reimagining the dense bricks that comprise the ruin in paper to evoke a sense of weightlessness. This weightlessness is also reminiscent of the bodily experience of moving through water: floating, swaying, shifting, drowning, and rising to the surface as the viewer circumnavigates the printed bricks. Floodplain (126) questions how this site/ruin can act as a reminder of the past, and serve as a catalyst to contemplate the imminent threat of global flooding and subsequent mass migrations due to climatic change, while meditating on the complexities and vulnerabilities of our physical structures and what they reveal to us as they face the test of time.