(English)

The installation “ my own private suffering” consists of five video portraits and one performance. For the portraits we worked with young Thai performers, who live and study at a theatre-homeschool in the countryside near Bangkok. We experienced that the question how to reach final happiness is not only a buddhist-philosophical one but a constant issue of everyday life in Thailand. Traces of the social need to be happy and express yourself that way are manifested in the advertisment billboards along the highways as well as on the tissues from the ice-cream company or written on the diary-books of school girls. We wanted to experience the other side of it and asked our performers to find out what ‘suffering’ means to them: What do we need to suffer? How manipulated are we in our suffering? Who directs our suffering? Are we creating our suffering by ourselves or do we use others to bring it up? do we need one director for it? (or two?) How can we show our sufferings? And how will a public react on this? Do we need our own private suffering? Do we have a right to suffer even if there is no catastrophe around us? Where can we find our suffering the best? In a temple, a theatre or under a green banana tree? And how shall we celebrate it? It resulted in 5 personal portraits. The performance, portrait 6, is our attempt to search for suffering by ourselves and we warmly invite our public to join us.

 ((other))

The installation “ my own private suffering” consists of five video portraits and one performance. For the portraits we worked with young Thai performers, who live and study at a theatre-homeschool in the countryside near Bangkok. We experienced that the question how to reach final happiness is not only a buddhist-philosophical one but a constant issue of everyday life in Thailand. Traces of the social need to be happy and express yourself that way are manifested in the advertisment billboards along the highways as well as on the tissues from the ice-cream company or written on the diary-books of school girls. We wanted to experience the other side of it and asked our performers to find out what ‘suffering’ means to them: What do we need to suffer? How manipulated are we in our suffering? Who directs our suffering? Are we creating our suffering by ourselves or do we use others to bring it up? do we need one director for it? (or two?) How can we show our sufferings? And how will a public react on this? Do we need our own private suffering? Do we have a right to suffer even if there is no catastrophe around us? Where can we find our suffering the best? In a temple, a theatre or under a green banana tree? And how shall we celebrate it? It resulted in 5 personal portraits. The performance, portrait 6, is our attempt to search for suffering by ourselves and we warmly invite our public to join us.