In 5 min Diane Barbé tells you what was the journey of the audience.

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During a two-week residency, isolated in nature in Nakhon Chai Si, a team of women who have never met before try to understand each other, they cook, swim, share intimate stories, exchange artistic skills.

At the core of the residency method is the question: how do we feel together? Why do we have an artistic idea, and how do we create together? As we all come from different countries and backgrounds, we may have disagreements and debates, which can be nourishing but also harming. We always strive for understanding and care, even if taming our ego is a personal responsibility. 

Together, artists carefully work their way toward creating a show of unprecedented form: an exhibition, a performative show, a happening, that the curator calls an "Explosition" where artists have to create Live. 

The night time show opened the doors of the old Bumrungvicha School in Klongsan District, Bangkok, to create an immersive multisensory exhibition which is different from conventional art formats and white cube spaces. It sought to imagine the different shapes, sounds, smells, textures and embodiments of silence from feminist perspectives.

As a Gesamtkunstwerk, the entire space of the school was turned into an Enclosed Garden. Trance-inducing performances, fantasmagorical set designs and political debates framed the concept into an artform impossible to translate or replicate. Rooms focused on rituals of care and liberation; on the domestic spaces that structure childhood, women’s labor, and beliefs in Thai society; on the physical and metaphorical bonds between bodies and territories, colonised on various levels that may differ across the world, yet all present a triangle of domination (oppressor; victim; and witness); and finally, on the imaginative possibilities of undoing harm, remodeling bodies of pain, and caring for each other within a community.

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The Heroines’Wave project in 2021 was supported by the Co-Production Fund of the Goethe Institute, by the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, and the French Embassy in Bangkok, as well as the generous support of private sponsor who preferred to remain anonymous for political reasons but without whom nothing would have been possible.  

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