Completed Inquiries: Satanan Prushyapornsri 2016

Looking at a Bangkok Suburb by Satanan Prushyapornsri (Thailand)

Looking at a Bangkok Suburb was a practice-based investigation and visual exploration
of a Bangkok suburb in area. Muban Sena Nivet, a housing estate in Ladprao area was
built in the late 1970s as part of the major wave of suburbanisation that transformed
Bangkok during that period. The research suggested that in both its architecture and the
advertising that promoted it, Muban Sena Nivet embodied various modern myths that
idealised aspects of suburban living, such as the ‘new’ lifestyle and status symbols. The
aims of the research were to find ways of uncovering this familiar and mythical
everydayness using a practice-based approach to inquiry. In order to achieve this, the
project integrated two main methodological approaches. Firstly, psychogeography was
used as a means of experiencing the urban landscape subjectively. Psychogeography
studies the psychological affects of urban space using various forms of walking to
register changing emotional and other responses to the built environment. The research,
was based upon multiple walks through the suburban landscape of Muban Sena Nivet
over the course of five months. Secondly, the potential of photography as a tool for
documentation, visual thinking and as a medium of creative expression was explored.
These approaches to inquiry were supported by archival, historical and oral history
research. The creative outcomes of the project were a series of aesthetic experiments
that sought to generate understanding by integrating this material visually. The
experiments culminated in a book that combined photographs of the suburb juxtaposed
and sequenced in such a way as to reflect the researcher’s psychogeographic
experiences, fragments of oral history interviews, original advertising material about the
place and a short reflective essay by the researcher. This creative research outcome
captured and communicated the main discoveries of this project: the duality and tension
between urban and suburban myths and the actual lived world. It demonstrated aspects
of the potential of photography both as a visual research tool and as a creative medium
able to communicate atmosphere and insights for the audience.