The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Can you talk about how you became involved in this project — Give more than you take ? I was at the Iaspis residency program in Stockholm in September 2008, and, at the airport, I met hundreds of Thais waiting to check-in. I talked to some of them, but they were quite anxious about sharing with me what they were doing in Sweden. They told me they came from the Isan provinces (the north-east where I also grew up), and took seasonal jobs in Sweden for two months a year. They were quite suspicious of me while talking about this, even though I spoke in dialect with them. In my research on Thai berry-pickers in Lapland, I was not only interested in the subject of labour and economy, but also in similarities — the job is popular with Thai farmers since reaping rice and picking wild berries have the same action. The difference is the long distances to cross, and the Lapland summer where you experience the midnight sun. I try to imagine what it is like working that hard in these light conditions, picking and carrying berries to weigh in at the end of every day, to earn some thousands of euros for back home. In 2010, I was invited for a residency at the CAC (Centre d’art contemporain de Brétigny) in France, for two months. I realised that the time and duration were the same for picking berries, so I proposed an artist residency in Lapland where I could join the pickers’ camp during the same period, instead of in Paris. Luckily, a camp in Åsele town accepted me, where the project began to take its own shape. Now I ask you: As the curator, could you describe how you see the project Give more than you take , and your response to both exhibitions so far: at CAC Brétigny and at Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bergamo? We liked how you took your experience of picking berries with other Thai workers in Lapland, and translated it through exchanges with the galleries you work with: the curators choose local materials, of an equal weight to the berries you picked, to display. It seems a powerful way to convey the idea of labour and its value without falling into documentary or romantic modes. It also brings in elements of the place where you show the work, extending your concepts into familiar territory. The Brétigny show appeared to emphasise waste — its pile of junk seemed to express the disconnection between workers and the products of their labour. The Bergamo show was more formal, featuring a strip of rubble from a nearby building site. It seemed to be less about waste and more about displacement — materials removed from one place and shifted to another. I spent many moments during the picking thinking about ‘what makes us work’, such as how different peoples’ thoughts might overlap if they were thinking about the same thing, or how differently they can turn out. Russell, would you give me a picture of what your translation of the project might look like, as if no image came with this interview? When thinking about what could match the weight of the berries, I tried to find a material that reflects a sense of labour, but is not necessarily manual, and is familiar to most people. I thought of paper, which is the material form of much of my labour, along with so many others. There are the hours spent reading, typing, printing and filing, the space that paper and files take up in the office, not to mention the enormous quantities that people discard. Paper comes in a standard format, but there are endless possibilities for what it could contain. It is also a medium that is threatened with passing, as we supposedly move toward a ‘paperless’ future. I imagine the installation as being stacks of used paper, files, documents, that have all been discarded and will end up recycled. It will have a formal simplicity, but contain evidence of hours and hours of work, compressed into the barest material. Through a sense of endless repetition, it could also suggest the monotony of much of the work that we do and the process of mass production, as well as echoing minimalist art, which often used industrial materials and serial forms. The photographs from your time in Lapland will show on a screen. And there will be two photographs from your ‘Meteorite’ series, for which you polished two fragments of meteorite to reflect the sky from where they fell. These extend, in a beautiful way, your art’s underlying ideas of equivalence, connection and exchange across enormous distances. Interviewed by Russell Storer, August 2012. PRATCHAYA PHINTHONG An interview TOP AND BELOW (RIGHT) PRATCHAYA PHINTHONG Thailand b.1974 Give more than you take 2010–ongoing Photographs / Images courtesy: The artist BELOW (LEFT) Installation view, ‘Give more than you take / Donne plus que tu prends’, CAC (Centre d’art contemporain de Brétigny), 2011 / Image courtesy: The artist and gb agency, Paris / Photograph: Steeve Beckouet 176