Over the past six years, I have researched and developed a practice that explores the experience of migrant workers outside their home countries. In 2015, I made a film and an installation about a Burmese worker in Thailand’s Chiang Mai Province. In 2018, while participating in an artist residency in Japan, I made another film, DESTINATION NOWHERE, about a young Thai man whose mother was a migrant worker who had illegally moved to Japan. I also made an installation about Thai workers in Japan and South Korea. In a way, PLOY is a culmination of this long project, and I wanted to make it into a feature film.
I collected the footage twice – first, over the course of two months in 2018, and then over the course of three months in 2020. At first, in 2018, I received a grant and visited Singapore without any pre-conceived ideas. I just wanted to explore the situation of migrant workers in Southeast Asia. In Singapore, I came across Kon Glai Ban (Persons far from home), edited by Pattana Kitiarsa, which is a book that contains stories written by Thai migrant workers expressing their experiences in Singapore. The book consists of 20 short diaries, but the only one which profoundly affected me was Ploy’s story. Ploy wrote passionately about her life, including the first time she arrived in Singapore, her experiences as a sex worker in a makeshift jungle brothel in Singapore’s parks and forests, her fight in court and the oppression she experienced. Ploy, like other workers in the book, prefers to remain anonymous. She chooses to share her life experience nakedly while hiding her true identity behind her words.
The book consists of 20 short diaries, but the only one which profoundly affected me was Ploy’s story.
I traced Ploy’s legacy by visiting the places she wrote about. I also went to many public parks and forests that the news has described as places where sex workers transformed the areas into makeshift jungle brothels. In some cases, I found traces of their activities. In others, I observed a renovated space, as if the state wanted to erase the memory of the place itself.
Two years later in 2020, I participated in an artist residency at NTU CCA, Singapore. I stayed there for three months and developed the project more in depth. In particular, I went to observe Sunday migrant gatherings. In Singapore, migrant workers and housemaids work 6 days a week, and because Sunday is their only free day, they gather at a public park, transforming the Singaporean public space into their own cultural space once a week. I went to these parks every Sunday and collected footage until the gathering was prohibited because of the COVID-19 pandemic. I also travelled to Hat Yai, a city in the southern part of Thailand, and Johor Bahru, a city at the border of Malaysia and Singapore, to trace Ploy’s journey in her diary.
For PLOY, I experimented with several kinds of visual media, from photographs, to paintings, to 35mm film slides.As a visual artist, I want to play with them and search for ways to include them as elements in cinema-making.
Prapat Jiwarangsan
