Pathompon ‘Mont’ Tesprateep was born in Bangkok but raised in Isan (the northeastern region of Thailand). He graduated with a Master degree in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Arts in London.
Mont’s body of works embrace the cinematic poetry to scrutinize the complex stratification of human mind and memory in relation to the crisis boundary of representative memory and politic of subjectivity.
Constructed from layers of sound and filmic materials – from celluloid to digital – and photography, his works conjure trance-like and immersive experience while emerging the playground of conscious and the dream structure that associates singular memory to the fragments and uncertainty.
Since 2014, Mont has been working on a series of hand-processed 16mm and S-8 films: Endless, Nameless (2014) and Song X (2017) and Confusion Is Next (2018). His works have been shown at film festivals and exhibitions; including Locarno Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival, Les Rencontres Internationales (Paris/Berlin), Curtas Vila do Conde (Portugal), Media/Art Kitchen at BACC (Bangkok), Asian Film & Video Art Forum (S. Korea), M+ Southeast Asia Moving Image Mixtape (HK), Crossroads 2018 at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Hamburg International Short Film Festival, Media City Film Festival (Canada).
Pleng-Krom-Dek (Lullaby) is the prologue of Mont’s ongoing film project “The Scattered World” (working title) (2019-2020) based on his research concerning the subnational conflict in the Deep South, Thailand. The prologue consists of four new renditions of traditional Chehe dialect lullaby tunes.
Mostly written by the locals, the traditional lyrics often reflect their ways of life, doctrines, and unique mixture of languages. In Pleng-Krom-Dek, Mont collaborates with a Thai Buddhist and a retired teacher Siriporn Thongchinda, who also works as a youth-rehabilitation social worker and a conservator of Chehe dialect, in rewriting the lyrics focusing on her attitude towards the current religious and cultural disharmony. Pleng-Krom-Dek is an attempt to blur the border between local lullaby and its implicit disguise as ideological hypnotism.
Photo source: westkowloon.hk
