All tagged thailand

Wounded Landscapes: Debris of War, Residual Vulnerability, and (Toxic) Intimacy in Post-Cold War Southeast Asia

Wounded Landscapes: Debris of War, Residual Vulnerability, and (Toxic) Intimacy in Post-Cold War Southeast Asia

Chairat Polmuk
Articles, Peer Reviewed

This paper investigates transnational ecologies of the vestiges of war in Southeast Asia, where a shared experience of vulnerability has become the very condition of everyday reality and aesthetic expression. Focusing on the legacies of the U.S. bombardment campaigns in Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand during the Second Indochina War, the author looks at how artists and filmmakers such as Allan Sekula (USA), Tada Hengsapkul (Thailand) Vandy Rattana (Cambodia), and Xaisongkham Induangchanthy (Laos), document the lingering effects—and affects—of Cold War atrocities through topographic aesthetics as a locus of “residual vulnerability”.

The Prismatics of Silk

The Prismatics of Silk

Alexandra Dalferro
Articles

Silk is so famously shimmery because of its prism-like, triangular protein structure that allows it to refract incoming light at different angles and thus to produce different colors. Yet this inherent material brilliance depends on the qualities of the silk threads and environmental conditions, like the amount and type of light. The author expands a literal approach to prismatics to metaphorically encompass the situated and contingent nature of material, bodily engagements with silks and their colors. This essay renders the prismatics of the three “mother colors” of silks in Surin, Thailand to reflect upon how colors are inseparable from sociocultural, economic, political, and historical considerations of their origins.