Som Supaparinya

My Grandpa’s Route has been Forever Blocked

The flat, wide river holds on its surface a tour-boat of memories, as Som Supaparinya documents her Grandfather’s return via cruise to familiar territories in rural Thailand that were submerged after the Thai government installed a series of dams. An unsettling sense of trauma emerges from the absence of what is being described in My Grandpa’s Route has been Forever Blocked. Supaparinya’s juxtaposition of unceasing waterways and cruise life with a series of dams, obstinately responsible for these conditions. The cruise becomes a space in-between possibility and mourning, a knowingly futile attempt to tour that which has been physically submerged from the geographic archive. Affects, strange and wistful, emerge from the displaced tourists, the dark of the river re-coordinating a memorial geography of loss for the cruise’s inhabitants, even as they generate new affinities. The dams continue their work throughout, unceasingly a-historical in their silent trace of erasure. My Grandpa’s Route has been Forever Blocked meditates on destruction through an act of burial, mediated through the ephemeral memory of the displaced. It poses no potential for return, rather suggests collectivity that sparks a profound, side-stepping energy in the face of overwhelmingly violent sources of power generation.