Habitación con vistas al coco

sinopsis

Through a fictionalized account of the bodiless voices hovering over commercially made presentation and historical strata, A Room with a Coconut View is an essayistic investigation of the politico-aesthetic relation through imagery surface and its netlike-technology apparatuses with a capitalistic-dictatorial-touristy regime as a backdrop. The work tells a story of Kanya, a tour guide and hotel rep automated voice, who leads her foreign automated-voice guest Alex through a deceptively aestheticized beach town in the east of Thailand. Dissatisfied with the sanitized, touristic images, Alex decides to explore alone. Local corruption becomes intertwined with the history of Thai cinema, and Alex begins to question his own subjectivity as a tourist and how images have been used to mediate his understanding of the world.

about the filmmaker

Born in 1986 in Chon Buri, Thailand, Tulapop Saenjaroen is an artist and filmmaker whose practice spans performance, video, film, and sound. His recent works interrogate the correlations between image production and the production of subjectivity, as well as the paradoxes intertwining control and freedom in late capitalism. By blending narrative and the essay film genre, Saenjaroen investigates themes such as tourism, self-care, mental illness, free labor, power relations in storytelling, and cinema itself through re-making and re-interpreting images and their networks. He holds an MFA in Fine Art Media from the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, and an MA in Aesthetics and Politics from CalArts.

Saenjaroen’s works have been widely showcased, including Berlinale, Locarno Film Festival, New York Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, and the Museum of the Moving Image, NYC, among others. His work has been the subject of focus programs at e-flux screening room, Conversations at the Edge at Gene Siskel Film Center, and M+ Museum in Hong Kong. Saenjaroen has received awards from Germany, Switzerland, Indonesia, Singapore, Russia, and Thailand. Saenjaroen currently lives and works in Thailand.