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Every edition of The Enclosed Garden explores the paradox within the concept of Intimacy. This year we come to ask if Silence release or repress our intimate thoughts. Silence kills more than a virus, since thousands years, all around the world. In this exhibition, the silence won't kill us.
Text by Celia Stroom, curator of the exhibition > The Enclosed Garden - Bangkok 2021.
"The concept of intimacy is treated in this event from the women’s perspective. Every year, I try to find an axis of research that makes sense to our present life. And 2020 has been a a disturbing syncope in our daily melody also punctuated by silences, in the shadows. Through lockdowns, rules, and protests, we may have all become isolated in our fears, our desires, and the silence may have become a shelter or a prison for many of us.
This year, I propose to explore deeper that topic.
As a researcher, I spend my time looking for the right words to describe sincere emotions, and coherent understandings of our complex world. And I do agree that the use of Wrong words can sometimes damage our perception of ourselves and destroy our relationships to others. Sometimes, we are also not allowed to speak by others or by ourselves! Then silence can become a wrong language as well.
So how can we cope with the concept of silence in a world where we are tamed to hide our idealist desires ?
I personally noticed that my silences never protected me. Your silence might not protect you either. Here, I sustain the very idea of the civil rights activist and writer Audre Lorde in her interview of 1977 where she proposes to go beyond our own psychological borders by transforming silence into words and actions. Of course self-revelation puts us in danger, however it might drive us to catharsis. this healthy process that we are afraid of, this depression, this dejection, this purgation of emotions.
And if I had tried to maintain silence in all situations of insecurity, I would still have suffered. And no extreme change in self understanding would have resulted in restoration and rebirth. Transforming the silence into word and actions requires courage and also togetherness, since nothing can be deeply achieved alone!
Let’s try in Spring to design a free creative space, according to our own rules, without any institutional diktat, in Thailand, a dictatorship where the law of silence prevails.
No reason to hide anymore that we are all frustrated, because if we are to only survive, without engagement, without imagination, and fantasy, then this life appears unbearable and meaningless!.
Imagination always enlarges the real.
Let's imagine together ways to interpret silence in an exhibition show and give it different shapes, sounds, smells, textures, and body Language.
I come now to ask questions to you artists, thinkers, activists who try to make things happen in and around them.
> What are the words that you would need to feel fulfilled, or released?
> What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you die of them, still in silence?
> Why you cannot break silence?
These questions can put us under pressure, but do not let fear interfere in our present search for meaning. I push here your boundaries and challenge you as I challenge myself intensively everyday. And as Audre Lorde mentions, here I am a curator doing my work challenging the artists and the audience – and I come to ask you, are you doing yours? "
Sound Design : Diane Barbé
Voices : Team of The Enclosed Garden #1 GEORGIA
The Enclosed Garden*3 > Thailand March-April 2021 : Residency of creation followed by Exhibition > 12 artists from Thailand and Europe > to be selected by 12.02 🌪JOIN THE WAVE #heroineswave A collective of activist researchers and independent artists.