The Palace

• พิพิธภัณฑ์ที่ไทเป - Pipittapan Tee Taipei Thailand 2007
  5 screen installation (Single Channel video in a corridor + Four channel videos in a room), various lengths, loops / Digital, 4:3, Silent / Colour
• Director / Camera / Editor Apichatpong Weerasethakul
• Sound Akaritchalerm Kalayanamitr
• Animation Peeraphat Kittisuwat

Presented as part of the exhibition Discovering the Other at the National Palace Museum, Taipei, 7 June – 19 August 2007, curated by Gertjan Zuilhof, exhibition director: Sunny Hu.

There is a room at a Palace Museum that is filled with spirits. It accommodates countless of memories spanning several centuries. The room has observed the artifacts, the faces, the sounds, and the moving images. The room itself is a moving image, a moving vehicle. It is a spaceship that has been sailing through the landscapes and time, from the Ages of Stone, Bronze, the Greek, the Roman, the Communist, and the Tsai Ming-liang. Now the artifacts have disappeared, so as lives. We are in the age of extinction. The cultures, the languages, the forests, the animals, the treasures hidden in the vast tunnels inside the mountains. We are then forced to move to the Age of Enlightenment when Nothing is meaningful. But the spirits remain, the spirits of the artifacts. At this particular spaceship, outside there used to be two dogs. And it used to be something called the rain. The dogs were always under the spaceship’s canopies and wings, sheltering themselves from the falling water. Now when the sky was empty because there was no sky, their spirits roamed the ship. They immersed themselves in the memories they hadn’t experienced, until they got bored.

Then they discovered that there was no longer Outside, only Inside. So they continue their journey with the ship, along with the other ghosts.