Admirers of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s work have an opportunity to discover one of his most celebrated installations at Tate Modern. The underground tanks underneath the museum’s brand new building are host to his 2009 nine screen multi-platform project ‘Primitive’, based in the village of Nabua, next to the frontier between Laos and Thailand, in a zone violently occupied by the Thai Army from the 60s to the 80s in order to repress a potential communist insurrection among the farmers. As the conflict escalated, men escaped to hide in the jungle and only women and children remained in town. This situation revalidated its old nickname of “widow town” according to the legend of a female ghost who abducted any man who entered her realm. Sadly battered again by Thailand’s recent political turmoil, Nabua is revisited and turned into a male only place. The director collaborated with the farmers’ young descendents who, detached from the location’s myths and troubles, were set to imagine a new future by building a sort of spaceship in the jungle.
The immersive experience begins with a video introducing this group of teenagers in a celebratory display of energy, running, jumping into the back of a truck and dancing to the tune of an infectious Thai pop song. Further inside, the circular space is dominated by two giant screens facing each other and delimitating a red carpet area full of cushions; an invitation for the viewer to lay down and gently fall into an oneiric state. The first of the big screens shows Nabua at night. Recalling the military flares that use to illuminate its sky, street lights and thunder-like explosions remind us of the village’s historical turmoil. The opposite screen is split in two, and its images are mostly shot inside the pod-like ship the kids have built; a red-lighted dreamlike space in which they sleep and share their thoughts to almost hypnotic effect, making it easy to get carried away by its lethargic spell.
Surrounding the main area are five other projections. Some of the films are fictional, using burning sheets and balls to evoke a phantasmagorical dimension; some others seem like a reenactment of the damage inflicted by the military or suggest a psychogeographical exploration. There is also a making of documentary and even a photography book, ‘Cujo’. The combination and viewing sequence of these elements suggest different narrative ideas that enable multiple individual approaches.
Nabua’s distressed history offers the director fertile ground to explore his habitual themes, the dualities between the mundane and the spiritual; the material and the subliminal; past memories and present realities. In his own words “Primitive is about reincarnation and transformation. It’s a reincarnation of presence (and absence). It’s also a reincarnation of cinema as a means of transportation as it was in the time of Melies: the ‘motion picture’ carries us from our own world”.
The installation finishes in a separate room with a short that anticipated his following feature. “Letter to Uncle Boonmee” is a reflection about the kind of home the man who could recall his past lives would have lived in, as well as a preview of some of the reincarnations which would become the subject of the Thai auteur’s acclaimed Palme D’Or winner.