Plinth

If tourism flattens a nation's history into souvenirs — branded stickers, tiny snow globes, patches, badges and anything that fits into a bumbag (or fannypack, depending on where you’re from), then Teeradakorn's National Opera Complex does the opposite. It explodes Thai history into a layered, multidimensional landscape: at once performance, sculpture, brand identity, viral video, and rave remnant, and affective instruction manual for a yet undefined future.

A traditional souvenir stand - equally legible in Hong Kong's night markets, London's Piccadilly Circus, Paris, or Bangkok - generates immediate sensual overload upon entering Gasworks. Sweatshirts are packed tightly alongside umbrellas and keyrings, patches and stickers, with enough merchandise to outfit a sizeable tourist group in head-to-toe memorabilia. But what would they be remembering exactly? What entity has fragmented into these cheap novelty trinkets?

Honing in on details is difficult at first, but once the eye is trained on the visual noise, repeated slogans become visible: ‘PSB D23’, ‘Neurohacking’, ‘If we can’t dance, it’s not a revolution’, ‘Enter the deep mind’, ‘Act observe, orient, decide’, ‘A symbiosis in which one of the symbiotic organisms lives inside the other’. The aesthetics fuse alt-gothic with punk, echoes of nineties subcultures and Thai pop culture. Like some deep corner of the internet solidified into IRL merch.

A throbbing soundscape emerges from within the stacked pile of souvenirs, as if ‘the thing’ itself was breathing. To get to the source of the sound requires crossing the threshold and entering the heart of the souvenir stand through a black curtain, into a small darkened room, in which we encounter Teeradakorn’s video work ‘The Rise and Decline of Absolutism’. After the thick material textures of the custom merch, the flatness of the screen creates a strange sensual vertigo.

Across five acts, four performers wearing costumes that blend Teeradakorn’s custom shirts with traditional Thai opera garments move in front of shifting green screen backgrounds. Their choreography alternately syncs with and drifts from the intense soundtrack, as a parade of localities flashes past: the Democracy Monument, Thailand's first factory, Wat Phra Kaew, an unknown military regiment, archival footage suggesting ominous military presence - all contained the visual language of video games. Peace-bringing swallows swarm above burning factory halls while elements of anime merge with neo-gothic scripts; warped post-internet aesthetics and references worlds clash with the refined choreography. 'Our rough path in front of us might be an unknown future and challenge but we can't give up,' declares the screen.

Teerdakorn’s sound world fuses gabber, hardcore, and K-step, with traditional Thai music into a dense sonic texture that 'hits,' for lack of a better term. The structure is not linear, but we move- from slow and dark, to frantic. A motif built from Khim (traditional Thai hammered dulcimer) and broken bells repeats throughout, lodging itself in some strange corner of your memory. As good opera motifs do.

'The Rise and Fall of Absolutism' draws on songs and writings by Chit Phumisak, the Thai linguist, philosopher and historian whose exposure to Marxism came, ironically, through an American government commission to translate the Communist Manifesto into Thai - an effort to prevent communism's spread in Southeast Asia. The mysterious 'PSB D23' appearing on patches references the 1953 CIA document on 'U.S. Psychological Strategy based on Thailand,' drafted when America needed a military base to continue its anti-communist campaign. The term ‘propaganda’ gained a negative taste profile after becoming predominantly associated with the Nationalist Socialists, and, afterwards, anyone who was not the U.S. In the U.S., ‘propaganda’ became ‘PR’ under Edward Bernays, and aided the government in election campaigns in Italy, coups against Guatemala, and gentler ‘soft power’ campaigns around the world.

Another key reference is the 1973 student uprising at Thammasat University, which ended the anti-communist military dictatorship, commemorated in Kunsak Reuangkongiaradti's 'Songs for the masses.' 'None of these stories appeared in the history books I was given at school,' Teeradakorn notes. Historical references to Thailand’s industrialisation, resistance, and politics are woven into the work's very texture, from its sound design to its merchandise aesthetics.

Yet, while steeped in diligent, caring and urgent research into Thailand's forgotten or forbidden histories, Teeradakorn's work deliberately foregrounds its affective qualities. Coming from a background in design, his artistic trajectory was dominantly shaped by music and music production: 'Music vibrates through you, it doesn't allow you to think,' he explains. 'I once heard a sound I had never encountered while sitting at my desk in Bangkok. I went down into the street and found people dancing to bootlegged CDs, remixed and filtered.' The unbounded rawness of DIY music cultures pulses through the work, informing his decision to omit sung, or spoken words from his five-act opera. 'Why make art if you can just read a book?' he asks. 'Art is more than research.'

Traditional Thai opera - Likay - was originally only performed in the royal palace. Since then, it has become an artform one mainly finds in rural areas, where locals perform often comedic four act performances involving spoken text and music, in front of brightly coloured scenographic backdrops. It is there, he tells me, where people update traditional storylines with contemporary economic grievances. Disregarding the history of opera since the 1950s and its current ossified zombie status in European culture, Western opera, too, once took it upon itself to tell and retell revolutionary narratives.

In seventeenth-century French theatre, the architecture mirrored society's structure: standing tickets for the pit, merchants in the ranks, the king in the central box - an architecture still present in buildings like the Royal Opera House in London. Yet any period performance maker knew the pit's displeasure could create such uproar that upper ranks couldn't experience the show. Opera, like theatre, was a form of social contract. It was Wagner who submerged audiences in darkness, and thus, disappeared the public. 'I am interested in all forms of entertainment, I don't see a difference between high culture or low culture,' Teeradakorn says. Inside the souvenir stand, the spectators of Teeradakorn’s video work become a public: ‘I asked the performers to look directly into the camera’, an artistic decision that creates a peculiar self-awareness, an awareness of other bodies in space, while simultaneously simulating the intimacy of a phone screen.

Through the 'we' invoked by slogans, through staged scenography inviting participation, and through its vibrating soundscape, National Opera Complex gestures toward an undefined multitude. Once brought together through collective learning on 1970s Thai campuses, this new multitude is animated by a different kind of proximity, one yet undefined but palpably present.

Upon leaving the sensual machine that is the souvenir stand (in a daze, it should be said), the viewer encounters another room, which is dominated by a scenographic backdrop from traditional Thai opera in two layers, inviting the audience to enter ‘the play’. Instantly instagrammable, this element evokes viral architectures in which users enter the same frame and infuse it with their own narratives, identities, cultures. Across the wall, five light boxes, show performers and backdrops the five acts of the video work; posters fans might hang up in their rooms.

Like an effective brand strategy, National Opera Complex is poised to break out into the world: into performances, merchandise, TikTok videos, sounds, infiltrating contexts and tissues like a delicious virus with an intensity capable of 'accumulating in memory, in habit, in reflex, in desire, in tendency,' to borrow from philosopher Brian Massumi. Here, Teeradakorn explores how decentralised modes of desirous communication - fandoms, merchandise, and viral content - offer possibilities for resistance, for change. The word ‘act’ appears only once in the video work, either a dramatic structuring device or an imperative: Act!

The show provides no defined strategy for action, it exists beyond traditional critique or activism. 'I am not interested in distinctions between right and left, I am interested in ambiguities,' Teeradakorn says. His National Opera Complex conjures a world where meaning is suspended in ambiguity, much like the future it gestures towards, while opening up a deeper, richer history from which we may draw our desires for the future.

By Klara Kofen