Author: Anaïs Moisy

Designer | Scientist | Dreamer

Sukhothai

After one afternoon working in our ‘balcony’ in front of our bungalow and seating at the cafe of our guesthouse (TR Guesthouse), we woke up early to visit the Unesco site of Old Sukhothai. We rented bikes to ride around the site. Beautiful ruins bricks temples in a park/forest and surrounded ricefield. It was the first time Clément was riding a bicycle since his accident: a big moment 🙂 . Not to mention it was such good bikes 😉

Sukhothai means “Dawn of Happiness”. It was the capital of the Sukhothai kingdom in the 13th and 14th centuries, in what is now the north of Thailand. The city walls form a rectangle about 2 km east-west by 1.6 km north-south. There are 193 ruins on 70 square kilometers of land. Inside are the remains of the royal palace and twenty-six temples (the largest being Wat Mahatha), ancient Buddha figures, palace buildings.

 

Toutes les photos ICI / All the pictures HERE

Lopburi & Phitsanulok

Lopburi

Today the city is best known for the hundreds of crab-eating macaques that live in the middle of the city, especially around the Khmer temple. They invade a sweet where all the batmen’s are abandoned and monkeys make the law. It is quite impressive, but they were not agressive and did not take any attention to us (yet, we were careful).

Phitsanulok

No much to see, so no much to say. We saw what is a typical thai city with no tourists. We just walked around for an afternoon and went to bet a 7pm 😉

Toutes les photos ICI / All the pictures HERE

Bangkok: city of contrasts

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We stayed 2 days in Bangkok, and we have 1 words to define this megalopolis: Contrasts

street shops / tower block
in the business / tower quarter, at the feet of the building the pavement are full of street food and clothes booths. The contrast is striking.

pollution / frying smell
the sense of smell is tickled all the time. Wherever it might be by the pollution (you realise what it might be to live in a big polluted city), the smell of all the small food booths on the pavements, in 5 meters you feel that you have traveled just with the smell of the environment. It can also be the smell of trash or sewer, which is not so pleasant but you know it is going to be here only for few seconds before the next nice smell of fried noodles or chicken brochette.

suv / scooter
we have been very impressed by the number of recent, brand new SUV in Bangkok (and now we can even say in Thailand). They seems to really love their vehicles and look brand new. They share the road with ‘poor’ scooters and touktouk. They seem to cohabit quite well on the big 6 lanes roads of the city. There is no klaxon ringing and no bumping cars.

consumerism / buddhism
buddhism temples in each corners of the streets and shopping mall at the other. One of the sentence you can find in buddhism percepts is “when money speaks, truth is salent” it is contradictory to find ‘temple’ of consumerisms. It is encouraged with very cheap products, advertisements… Also the add are most of the time with western women or american houses very far from the thai culture which doesn’t seem very right at a first glance (and still at a second one).

rules / chaos
it seem that the thai follow rules, they queue to go in the train, they drive slowly and at the same time you feel a atmosphere of chaos, with the dense traffic, busy pavements… it is a very contradictory feeling and it makes the city very interesting. 

shed / roof top swimming pool
people living in sheds on the side of the highway or at the bottom of skyscraper, when you can go in the same tower swim on a roof top…

shopping mall / Siam Paragon
busy busy little shops in big shopping malls where you have to discuss the price of each items… cheap products and unusual experience. Siam Paragon is the luxurious shopping mall where you can buy cars and fashion in a very designed set. Only few unites form the other shopping mall. We saw students just walking around after school dreaming about all these luxurious products and laughing drinking take away juices.

train / water bottle
we paid 30 baths (£0.5) for a bottle of water (which usually is 10 baths) when we had to pay 22 baths (£0.4) for a train ticket.

taxi meter / taxi no meter 
80 baths to cross the city with  taxi meter. However, when your ride is too short the taxi refused to put the meter on and ask you 100 baths for 5 min ride. We were tired but not stupid and decided to walk 15 minutes to eat delicious seafood.

 

 

What we did in Bangkok

we stayed in a Palace (thanks to Clement’s aunt and oncle for this Christmas Present, which allowed us to have great night sleep and recover from the jet lag): Centara Watergate Pavillion Hotel. We thought it will be difficult when we were at the airport to manage to get a taxi and find it … (we did not planed the arrival at all, we had no idea in which area that hotel was, how to get there form the airport…) It was without counting on our luck : when we went out of the sky train from the airport, on the platform we saw the name of our hotel on a tall building. We just had to walk for 15 min in this direction to find it.

Visits

Wat Phra Kea & Grand Palais

the pictures talk for themselves 🙂 We did it early in the morning (we were up at 6am because of the jet lag and we were in bet at 6pm when we arrive). It was already busy but nothing in comparison with when we left around 10am. It might be impossible during the day to enjoy it properly because of the crowd.

Queen Sirikit Museum of Textiles
it was included in the price of the tickets for Wzt Phra Kea. It was a good surprise , museum very well designed with beautiful garments.

Wat Pho

Contrast on a same site: to see the main Buddha it was very very busy and 200 meters away it was empty. It resulted on a peaceful moment, where we were wondering almost alone watching some workers renovating panels or just chilling out.

Boat trip on the khlong

we were only two in the boat, beautiful ride on the khlong, again full of contrast. It was like being in the countryside sometimes when in the background you had the big tower blocks and high way.

Jim Thompson house

in a luxuriant garden, nice typical house in Siam Square area (tower blocks and high way). A bit too touristic for us, and in particular the restaurant which wasn’t very good and expensive/ However, again the contrast between the area and the site was striking.

Roof swimming poll at Centara Central

same owner of our hotel which allowed us to go for free
we felt asleep on the deckchair at dusk it was quite magical

Shopping malls

see descriptions above

Chinese and Indian quarter
we did not really find the interesting part of the Chinese quarter at night as we ended up in streets full of rats un the trash and pavement, and if you don’t know I have a phobia of these devil animals so we stop searching for the ‘cool streets’ and went back to the hotel)

Toutes les photos ICI / All the pictures HERE

Depart / Departure

 

Ca y est, on est parti. Apres 5 ans d’attente, nous nous sommes envolé vers un autre contient pour 3 mois. Au programme de l’aventure: Thailande, Laos, Sri Lanka, Inde et Nepal.

Here we go, we left Europe. After 5 years waiting,  we took off for an other contient, traveling 3 months. On the adventure’s programme: Thailand, Laos, Sri Lanka, India et Nepal.

Toutes les photos ICI / All the pictures HERE

 

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Krakow Contemporary Art museum

We went during our road trip in Eastern Europe in the Contemporary Art museum in Krakow. We have been very impressed by the quality of the exhibitions.

 

The first one called Gender in Art confronting significant civilisational themes with artist’s interpretation.

Presentation by the museum

Gender is socially constructed sex. Gender studies examine the way history and culture determine sex. Who a man or a woman is in a given world largely depends on the one who manipulates these images. For centuries the conception of gender has remained in the hands of religions, which have imposed ʻproperʼ social roles on the representatives of different sexes. This has been going for so long that it has come to be seen by many as the law of nature. A vast majority of religions have reduced woman to the role of the weaker, more stupid and subordinate sex. To many people this still seems to be ʻnaturalʼ. Currently we are trying to understand the mechanisms behind this manipulation and lead to a situation in which full dignity and equal rights of all genders would be secured. We endeavour to arrive at a point where gender would cease to be an ideological construct and become man’s individual decision that is closest to their sense of identity. The exhibition at MOCAK fits in with the field of these reflections, studies and claims.

 

 

The second one Poland – Israel – Germany: The Experience of Auschwitz
It was very moving, and maybe for me more powerful to foster the historical atrocity than visiting Auschwitz. Some of the pieces were actually about questioning the fact that it is becoming a touristic destination, where companies are making money and tourists take holidays pictures. They are questioning if it is appropriate in such place.

Presentation by the museum

The exhibition at MOCAK highlights the significant presence of the theme of Auschwitzin the historical, social and cultural discourse. It demonstrates how contemporary artists from Poland, Israel and Germany interpret events from the past. This is not about presenting art broadly thematically related to the Holocaust, rather – about works that deal with the ‘anus mundi’– Auschwitz as a place of genocide, the most tragic man-made symbol there is. The exhibition poses a number of questions. After the last witnesses have died, will Auschwitz become a dark and vacant pop-cultural motif, a pure provocation, a horror Disneyland? Or are such worries exaggerated? Will the second and third post- Auschwitz generations feel a responsibility to carry the memory of these events?

 

Depot Kunstreferat, Heuchelhof, Jehuda Bacon
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Master Degree Show


 
I contributed to install and design the Design Informatics Master degree show this year. I designed the posters (pictures by BinBin), the label of the different works and put together all the video clips to be projected on the big screen.
The results was great, quite different from the other show as it was set up as an exhibition and not as personal stands. It gave unity and reflected the way the department works.
 

SAAD

I created this project, in collaboration with PhD Hadi Mehrpouya, as the final piece of my master thesis.

Please have a look at our WEBSITE to have more informations about the project.
 
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Abstract
Everyday we get bombarded with data and information from all over the world. Often we feel helpless about our abilities to do things while being trapped in the dilemma of knowing the consequences of our consumptions and choices. Playing on these feelings, SAAD, from Afrikaans meaning Seed, is visualising human deaths as a direct and indirect result of the mining industry and conflict minerals in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), used to build smart-phones and computers. The project is constructed on different layers which all recall the idea of being on the edge, the border between life and death, and emphasise the complexity of nothing being either totally positive or negative. SAAD is composed of two complementary installations: a seed dispenser and a plant, visualising deaths due to the mining industry in Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). It aims to push the reflexion of the responsibility Western consumer users of smartphones and computers have towards these workers. It plays on the feeling of being helpless towards the different issues our societies are facing. The project is constructed on different layers which all recall the idea of being on the edge, the border between life and death, and emphasise the complexity of nothing being either totally positive or negative. It aims to symbolise the complexity of today’s world and the difficulty to position the self and the ethic in it. We choose to focus on the partial perspective we have of our electronic devices nowadays, as it is something most Europeans possessed and use everyday without questioning the impact it can have on other human beings and the natural environment.