Bringing Beautiful Trouble to Bangkok: A night of tactical artstorming

Bringing Beautiful Trouble to Bangkok: A night of tactical artstorming

By Emily Hong and Kriangsak Teerakowitkajorn

On Friday nights once a month, artists, techies, and activists crowd into a small but lively space in the heart of Bangkok to debate some of Thailand’s hottest social issues. When the Reading Room (an alternative art space in Bangkok), and the Thai Netizen Network invited us to facilitate a workshop for its “Night School” series, our topic of choice was a no-brainer. We were still reeling from a horrible disappointment—the witnessing of a painfully uncreative and unsuccessful action—a run of the mill petition delivery to the American Chamber of Commerce (so boring that they sent the office secretary to meet with us!) in what could have been a beautifully strategic action for the otherwise awesome Thai trade union for electronics workers. Sadly, such unimaginative actions are far too commonplace, and Thailand is no exception. Thai folks on the left and right side of the spectrum (often recognizable from their bright red and yellow shirts) have been great at street mobilization, but are sorely lacking when it comes to creative and strategic actions. Now here was an opportunity—on a silver platter no less—to convert the masses!

The Night School’s eclectic mix of artists, techies, and activists crowd in for the evening.

The title of our workshop: “Creative/Cultural Resistance: A Tactical Workshop for Artists and Activists.” Our aim: to get the crowd riled up (no small task on a Friday night!) about the intersection of direct action, art, and culture, and arm them with some new tactics to apply to the struggles they hold dear.

We started with an icebreaker we adapted for a Thai-context—“which ingredient would you be in a collective bowl of spicy papaya salad?” As each person came up to the front with a paper cutout of their metaphorical salad ingredient, we learned quickly what people felt they could bring to the movement. The rank-and-file activists chose the staple papaya, whereas artists and techies added some fish sauce, lime, or chilies to the mix.

The result of our icebreaker!

In view of what actions we had and had not seen in Thailand, we presented a selection of tactics from Beautiful Trouble, grouping them into categories of “stepping up your basics,” (e.g. creative petition delivery), “artistic imagery” (e.g. guerrilla projection), and “theatrics” (e.g. nonviolent search and seizure). Armed with the how to’s, and some pretty rad examples from the book, folks in the workshop seemed ready to jump into discussing what might work in their organizing. We went straight into a tactical artstorm, giving each small group an issue, and list of possible tactics, targets, and points of intervention. After some animated discussion, loads of debate and not-so-infrequent laughter (we were now approaching our third hour, at 9pm on a Friday, no less!) we rounded everyone up for report-back. Group by group, folks walked us through some very impressive and creative plans—from the guerrilla projection of a banned movie outside the Thai Best Film of the Year ceremony, to invisible theater on a public bus trying to confront patriarchy. Perhaps the most strategic action was one group’s plan to protest Article 112 of the Thai constitution, which bans anyone from insulting the King of Thailand. They proposed a creative petition delivery on the occasion of a World Press Freedom Day event where government officials would be present. Their action—get the petition deliverers to wear orange prisoner jumpsuits and masks of political prisoner Ar-kong, with banners spelling out “I’m in jail for a text message” (which reflects the twenty-year prison sentence meted out to a cancer-ridden 61-year-old “grandfather” as “Ar-kong” can be translated; he died in prison just one month after our workshop, sparking further anger and passion on the issue of Article 112 and political prisoners in Thailand).

Acting out the creative petition delivery with an Ar-Kong mask.

All in all we were extremely impressed by the commitment and ingenuity of this fantastic group of people (it’s not often enough that one finds artists, activists, and techies working synergistically for social justice ends!). We were heartened that despite the seeming lack of strategic and creative/cultural actions in the Thai political landscape, at least a small group of Thai activists were indeed aching for new ways to think about mobilizing for social change. Beautiful Trouble may have been written by a largely American group of activists, and perhaps with a more “western” audience in mind, but in our view, it certainly has a lot of potential for activists working in the global South. After all, history has shown us that arts and culture have a peculiar power in both mobilizing against and simultaneously evading certain forms of state control (see Nadine Bloch’s BT entry “If protest is made illegal, make daily life a protest”). One of my favorite examples is the Chilean peoples’ strike of 1983, to which one could easily ask, with regard to the simultaneous banging of pots and pans, “are we protesting the regime, or are we cooking dinner?”

The facilitators!

The facilitators

Emily Hong is a Seoul-born and New York-raised activist, trainer, and writer who is currently pursuing a PhD in socio-cultural anthropology at Cornell University. Emily has spent over four years in Thailand, including on the Thai-Burma border, working as a trainer and training adviser to minority rights activists from the region, and as a campaigner for Burma’s democracy movement-in-exile. She also played a critical role in the launch of CORE Burma, a novel training program on rights-based community organizing and nonviolent direct action, consisting of a partnership between the multi-ethnic coalitions Students and Youth Congress of Burma and Nationalities Youth Forum. She is currently serving on the Board of Directors of Amnesty International USA.

Kriangsak Teerakowitkajorn is the producer and host of Capitalism 101, a web-based hard-talk program on the impacts of capitalism in Thailand. Kriangsak is a writer who focuses on issues of neo-liberalism, development, and labor, and is a former lecturer at the College of Interdisciplinary Studies at Thammasat University. He is now a PhD student in Geography at Syracuse University.

Emily and Kriangsak directed and produced the short film Occupy Everywhere: Some Inspiration for Thailand, focusing on the consensus-building strategies of Occupy Wall Street. They can be contacted at emilyhong9@gmail.com and kiang114@gmail.com.