The Past That Won’t Stay Past

28.04.2026

The Past That Won’t Stay Past: Where Conflict Refuses to Settle is a live performance about memory and the cities we live in. It starts from an idea: memory is always changing, shaped by different places over time.

This work is a collaboration between Pitchapa Wangprasertkul (performance), a Bangkok-based artist whose practice engages with the city and its social realities, often exploring power, vulnerability, and the relationship between the body and its environment. Alongside her is Akila Subiyakto (sound), a Yogyakarta/Berlin-based artist currently developing her practice through Cultural Studies. Her work explores perception – how we see, how things are shaped, and how meaning forms in the spaces we share.

This is a duet between sound and action. Akila Subiyakto will work with sound: breaking apart old songs (written in Berlin) through loops and distortion, layered with field recordings from Yogyakarta.

Pitchapa works with physical materials: Wangprasertkul’s performance is drawn from the city, using stones to scratch and erase text from papers collected in Bangkok, such as advertisements, flyers, and other everyday printed materials. Through these gestures, the artist attempts to remove unnecessary words and uncover hidden narratives that reflect her personal memories of the city.

This act of physical erasure carries a broader meaning. The friction between stone and paper becomes a symbolic of reconnecting to what beneath urban life, where experiences are often shaped and commodified under capitalist conditions. Each scratch, marked by the collision of material surfaces, represents both destruction and reconstruction. Rather than seeking perfect synchronization, Wangprasertkul and Subiyakto engage in a process of listening and response. Sound and movement were execute in relation to one another.

Together, they create a live dialogue where material, and sound continuously reshape the memory of the city in real time

Photo and Video by Nattakarn Jirarattanawan