Reflection Notes from the Site: Monsoon School #1

Monsoon School #1: Site as Method closed! Ten days together left us inspired and challenged. Somewhere between long conversations, shared meals, collective experiments, and difficult questions, a small community took shape among practitioners, now friends, from across Thailand, Southeast Asia, and China.

Growing from encounters with independent initiatives across Thailand and unfolding in two parts, Monsoon School #1 asked: how can a site become a source of knowledge, and how might that knowledge reshape a practice? During the first five days, Open Studios led by NOIR ROW ART SPACE, LIR, and field-0 brought presentations into conversation with project clinics, exercises, and the participants’ own questions. Together, we travelled from Udon Thani to institution-making on the moving ground of Kaliurang, entwined with Mount Merapi’s volcanic cycles; and a village in Wuhan, where an ageing population lives with the absences and enduring connections created by migration.

The second half, facilitated by Exutoire with support from Sher Maker Studio, turned towards collective imagination and making, with Monsoon School itself as a site. It was not until the sixth day of Monsoon School #1 that the monsoon finally came. We began the second half of the program by reflecting on the first five days. We then moved into a collective imagination exercise prompted by Exutoire’s proposal: a table for a site. What can a table do? What might it be made of? What could we do with it? How do we go about making it? These questions allowed us to loosen our fixed assumptions about what a table is or could be. Before narrowing our ideas to what was possible within the time and resources available, everyone had an equal say in imagining what the table might become. Perhaps surprisingly, the group arrived at a set of shared principles.

Over the following days, we dispersed across the city in search of reclaimed wood and flood-stained deadstock fabric from Warorot Market, materials that carried traces of the waters and flows of goods that have shaped Chiang Mai over time. Sher Maker Studio generously opened its new workshop to us in Hang Dong. The wood group learned basic woodworking techniques with makers while encountering the cultures and histories embedded in the materials themselves. The fabric group worked with Auntie Nong and Auntie Saeng, who helped sew the flood-stained fabric according to their design. This process required us to work together, compromise, negotiate, and recognise what each person could bring to the table.

Additionally, a night walk led by Associate Professor Dr. Chiranthanin Kitika took us from Chiang Mai’s Old City to Jing Jai Market. We followed disconnected paths and stories that had slipped from view, coming to know the neighbourhood in which Monsoon School was grounded and of which deCentral is becoming a part.

This entire process became a way of bringing the questions of Monsoon School #1 into practice: how might a site teach us what to make, how to make it, and how to work together? Formed through the materials, histories, resources, limitations, and relationships we encountered, the tables became both traces of the program and propositions for how the space might continue to be used.

Among different practices, disciplines, and ways of knowing, even the meaning of “site” refused to stay still. We wrestled with positionality, sensibility, working within communities, the language that shapes such relationships, and the right to opacity. We arrived with questions and left with even more. To our co-facilitators and participants: thank you for the knowledge, openness, trust, care, vulnerability, and humour you brought into the room.

Traces of Monsoon School #1 now remain in the space, which will be open to the public as a community space at deCentral Chiang Mai. You are welcome to spend time here together.

Opening Hours:

Monday–Friday: 10:00–17:00

Saturday–Sunday: 08:00–17:00

Photos: Sirasin Pangprasertkun, Wuttichai Inchoo, and the Monsoon School team