Pratchaya Phinthong

Today will take care of tomorrow

Pratchaya Phinthong’s work has explored the mineral and karmic economies of Laos, a country that shares language, beliefs, and a long border with his own native region of Isaan (Northeast Thailand). The most bombed nation on earth, Laos still bears the physical and mental scars of the U.S. military’s epic aerial offensive, launched largely from bases in Isaan, during the Second Indochina War. Between 1964 and 1973 the US dropped an estimated 250 million cluster bombs on Laos. As much as 30% of them remain there in the ground, waiting to explode, despite sustained transnational efforts to clear them. The video work, Today will take care of tomorrow, borrows its title from a poem by Paul Malimba about the country’s beautiful but dangerous landscape. The subtly defamiliarizing gaze of an infra-red camera seeks out trees that have absorbed shrapnel from this indiscriminate violence, around the ruins of an old Buddhist temple half-destroyed by the bombing. Not only have the trees assimilated the foreign matter and thrived despite their wounds, but years later the embedded metals act like accidental amulets, destroying the blades of illegal loggers who must then leave these areas alone. As if protected by an invisible force, the forest has absorbed one violence, which shields it against another. That one time should take care of another may seem like wishful thinking, but this is no personification. The aphorism points to circulations that are both more substantial and more than human. Pratchaya exercises his trademark poetics of conversion and substitution in an ongoing collaboration with inhabitants of Napia Village, near the prehistoric Plain of Jars in Laos’s central Xiangkhoang Plateau. Here, the mineral surplus of global conflict is melted down in small family-run foundries and reborn as decorative or functional domestic objects.