Wichaya Artamat, Pathipon (Miss Oat), Duck Unit

From the student massacre perpetrated at Thammasat university in October 1976 up to the uprising of the Thai youth in 2020, the country’s contemporary history has been that of an unending cycle of coups d’état and repression, the violence of which has been made invisible by the construction of an official collective memory. Wichaya Artamat’s uses what remains of these past revolts—testimonies, ghosts and emotions—as the point of departure for a new theatre of resistance, in order that unfinished struggles can feed into the imagination of revolutions to come. The sparse playing space reveals the very mechanisms of the theatre, a ghostly presence with which the performers must contend. Standing up against censorship, authoritarianism and the injunctions of dominant ideology, Wichaya Artamat, Pathipon (Miss Oat) and Duck Unit bring us a work that shifts between mourning and invocation, at the intersection between historical reconstitution, meta-theatre performance and revolutionary fiction.