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Project

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Ghost 2565: Hosts

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Hosts visit Chao Mae Tubtim Shrine. Photo by Montika Kham-on, 2022

Ghost 2565: Hosts is a docent program in which embodied and situated knowledge of artworks and locations is shared with visitors within and beyond the local community. As part of this endeavor, hosts learn from local community members who have generously shared stories from their neighborhoods and unwritten archives of diverse minorities in Chinatown and neighboring areas expanding and redefining community. The program approaches the Samyan area through collectives such as Samnak Nisit Sam Yan Student Publishing House—comprising Chulalongkorn students who produce knowledge, archive, and organize—as part of a traditional and spiritual protest against the gentrification in the highly contested area where an important shrine will be removed. As artworks always exist within a site, hosts provide various entry points through alternative pedagogies of mutual learning, discussion, and reading, turning exhibition locations into dialogical sites where multiple voices to share entangled tales. They move from student protests of May 1968 to those in Thailand in subsequent years, to the larger cosmologies of technology that construct the self, encouraging participants to encounter the unexpected, embrace their own experiences, and channel narratives of the artworks in relation to themselves and local histories. Informed by marginalized histories, program participants are thereby introduced to alternative methodologies of community-building and preservation practices in Bangkok.