Facilitated by Exutoire, a Hanoi-based queer spatial practice, they will draw on their experience in critical architectural practice and pedagogy, leading Monsoon School #1 in a collective exploration of each participant’s approach to site-based artistic production. Opening up a space of inquiry, generating questions around methodology and encouraging reflection among participants, they will introduce basic tools for site investigation. By focusing on learning through study groups and workshops, Exutoire will collectively think through comparative site-based methodologies from different contexts alongside collective making as a mode of thinking through doing.

Three particular encounters aid participant discussions, delivered by NOIR ROW ART SPACE (Udon Thani); LIR (Yogyakarta); field-0 (multiple sites between London, Southeast Asia and China), presenting various kinds of ‘Open Studio’ (documentation and insight into methods of practice) in order to assist understanding of process and reference as responsive and situated in particular context, exploring how practice can engage with site across distinct political, ecological, and historical conditions.

• NOIR ROW archives objects and artefacts in and beyond Udon Thani as a method for accessing non-linear histories shaped by Cold War infrastructures and local archaeological contexts. They will share how their methods open up alternative readings of site beyond human-centered narratives.
• LIR presents '9000mdpl', a multi-site long term project developed in Kaliurang, a village under Mount Merapi (Yogyakarta). Working closely with local communities, '9000mdpl' engages site through laku—a methodology grounded in walking, embodied experience, and sensory attunement in response to the active cycles of the volcanic eruption. Its evolution from a site-specific project into a biennale and institutional model demonstrates how site can reshape both the form and methodology of artistic and curatorial practice.
• field-0 presents their approach to site as fluid and mobile rather than geographically fixed. Their long-term field-driven projects move across shifting environments—from rural Wuhan to the Mekong River across Vietnam, Thailand, and Cambodia—developing a transdisciplinary methodology that moves with the site itself.
• Sher Maker (Chiang Mai) provides workshop support to Monsoon School #1, informed by local folk knowledge, vernacular construction methods, and hiking as a form of research. They will open their studio to support participants in materializing spatial and object-based responses to the queries examined throughout the 10 days.

deCentral Chiang Mai* will sit within Jing Jai Market, which began in 2006 as a space dedicated to organic agriculture, supporting sustainable livelihoods for local farmers. The area around Jing Jai Market is situated in what was once part of the larger wetland system known as Nong Bua swamp or หนองบัวเจ็ดกอ (Nong Bua Chet Ko), an extensive body of water that historically shaped the northern edge of Chiang Mai and formed part of the city’s hydrological infrastructure until the mid-twentieth century.

Fed by streams descending from Doi Suthep, the wetlands absorbed seasonal floodwaters before channeling them toward Khlong Mae Kha and eventually the Ping River. Beginning in the 1960s and accelerating through the 1970s and 1980s, Chiang Mai’s modernization projects, including irrigation canals, the Super Highway, Chiang Mai Municipal Stadium, and roads such as Rattanakosin and Atsadathon, gradually fragmented and filled these wetlands. Waterways were redirected underground, floodplains became real estate, and the city increasingly turned away from the hydraulic intelligence that had once sustained it.

Seen through this longer history, the site of deCentral in Chiang Mai occupies not only a new creative commercial district, but a former wetland landscape, an area where traces of Chiang Mai’s ecological and infrastructural memory remain buried beneath contemporary urban development.

*deCentral Chiang Mai opens officially as a space, in March, 2027. Monsoon School embraces the transition of this site as previously a commercial gallery towards a temporary community-oriented platform - such transition mirrors the intention of the School itself: provisional, process-based, collectively shaped, and testing methods before institutional stabilization. During Monsoon School, the space will function simultaneously as a site for workshops, presentations, open studios, and collective learning.

Participants will be selected based on:

• Attentiveness and inventiveness in engaging questions of site, history, spatial conditions, community, or lived environments
• Interest in field-based inquiry, collective learning, and experimental methodologies
• Openness to collaboration, discussion, and working across disciplines and formats
• A desire to further engage and reflect on one’s own social, ecological, political, or spatial conditions

• Ability to work collaboratively and conduct field research
• Comfortable working physically and outdoors
• Proficient in English
• Participants are responsible for organizing and financing their own travel and accommodation
• Full attendance of 10 day program
• There is no age limit

Please fill out the registration form: Monsoon School #1 Application Form

Your application should be written in English, and include:

• Letter of interest (max. 500 words): A short introduction to your practice, interests, and why you would like to join the program.
• Project description (max. 10 pages): Please describe a project, inquiry, or site-based investigation you would like to develop in relation to the Monsoon School’s conceptual framework. The proposal does not need to be fully developed or resolved. It only serves as a way for us to understand how your practice relates to the questions and methodologies explored through Monsoon School.
• Cirriculum vitae (in Doc or PDF, max. 10 MB)