Khonkaen Manifesto is a non-profit art activist and collective organization based in Khonkaen, Northeast of Thailand. Our aim is to carry on spirits and aesthetics of resistance through artistic and cultural approaches of marginal communities in the Northeast of Thailand.
The vision of the MANIFESTO is to manifest and create opportunity for artistic and cultural participatory between art activists, cultural workers, and communities. The mission of the MANIFESTO is to focus on certain issues such as subculture, subaltern, migration etc., as well as to engage creativity through public forum and play a central role in raising the awareness of art, culture, politics, environment.
The People’s Manifesto: Ghost & Spirit of Khonkaen Manifesto aims to open up space through and for arts in various mediums and branches. It is to give voice as well as platform to those exploited, forgotten and displaced by overwhelming mainstream developments whether that be cultural, social, political or economic, craft, music, theater and performance embodied by those at the periphery has long been a medium of their social fabric woven into their everyday life –an expression and representation of their livelihoods of their arts.
For example, the spirit of Mor-Lam (traditional Lao music and performance, partly play in the Northeast of Thailand and Laos) has become a subculture in the eyes of Siam, passed on its wisdom and ideology of practitioners to communities through festival with vivid movements. These representatives, contemporary materials and practices are brought to the forefront of the People Manifesto: Ghost & Spirit of Khonkaen Manifesto in Biennale Jogja 2019, hoping that the communities can participate as collaborators and outspokenly express their cultural rights through artistic and cultural practices.
Directed by Thanom Chapakdee, the exhibition features participating visual artists Adisak Phupa, I-na Phuyuthanon, Nutdanai Jitbunjong, Wantanee Siripattananuntakul, and Woraphan Intaraworapad. With their contributions of moving image and site-specific installation works at an abandoned place in the city of Yogyakarta, The People’s Manifesto: Ghost & Spirit of Khonkaen Manifesto hopes to convey and interrogate the movement of displacement from Khonkaen to Jogja.
