Friday Presentation at Rirkrits house

We travel back to Chaing Mai from 'The Land' today and walk over to Rirkrit's House in the evening from the office in town. It is about a 30 minute walk, Tom shows Aoife and I the way in a light drizzle of warm rain. We have been asked to prepare something to present on Trespass this evening. We have brought along a recently made DVD of our project. Rirkrit's home is in a wealthier more up and coming part of Chaing Mai, many of the houses in the area have big gates and look quite luxurious. We pass a village of what looks like a shack settlement, all corrugated iron housing on our way. (I am later told that these are not in fact squatters but construction workers usually Burmese illegal migrants, the company they work for gives them the land temporarily for settlement). We take off our shoes on entering his home. Rirkrit is not in Thailand this month, he has a busy schedule and the typical jet set art star life style. He is expected to be back in September to work on the art section of the One Year Project 2 . I have not met him. His friends Carl and Jan stay at his home, they are preparing for a show in Bangkok and are traveling with their gallery. His home is amazing. We walk into a courtyard with a tropical garden, bedrooms, an office, lounge and kitchen all have sliding doors opening onto the tropical garden. We walk on the raised wooden platform over to a white room, studio/exhibition space where people are gathered for the presentations. The side wall opens onto the garden where you can hear the monsoon rain bouncing off large tropical leaves. I choose a seat close to the garden so I can tune into that sound if I get bored during the presentations. His recently completed home is beautifully designed and tasteful. There must be serious money in art I think, social sculpture included. This world of art dealers and galleries is one I still don't understand, maybe I could ask Rirkrit to do a presentation for us One Year Participants revealing this world . Michael von Hausswolff a sound artist and Jan Hafstrom
a painter present to us One YearProject participants and friends of The Land . A really interesting project that Michael was involved in was this: http://www.elgaland-vargaland.org/. After dinner we present 'Trespass' and some of the other people attending show their practices. We catch a lift home with Aom who has done all the translating for the evening. We hear the next day that Aom hit a buffalo on her way home after dropping us back to the rented house just after midnight. Her car is totaled, the buffalo killed and she fortunately completely unscathed.