km.0, an artistic inter­ven­tion trans­form­ing the pub­lic spaces around Vic­tory Monu­ment, is cur­rently under­way in Bangkok.

Dir­ec­ted by UK artist Maria Stukoff and Thai cre­at­ive group Apostrophe’S, km.0 takes a multi-faceted approach, with sev­eral strands or types of activ­it­ies designed to engage with the diverse groups who use the space, and to address the many issues — from pol­lu­tion to cre­at­ing human con­nec­tion, safety to his­tory and memory — that this com­plex and chaotic pub­lic space suggests.

We’ll be explor­ing the work over the next few days, but to begin we’ll intro­duce you to Maria Stukoff and Kasama Yamtree from Apostrophe’S in this series of videos. Maria and Kasama take us through the chal­lenges posed by the site, describe the audi­ences they’re hop­ing to con­nect with over the life of the pro­ject, and explain the ideas behind their work.

If you’d like to dis­cover more about this work, check out this fant­astic inter­view with Maria and Kasama in BK Online, read our over­view of the pro­ject, or visit Maria’s blog for doc­u­ment­a­tion of the work in progress.

Part One: An intro­duc­tion to Vic­tory Monu­ment

Maria N Stukoff: “Vic­tory Monu­ment is a very excit­ing place… there’s a round­about that has seven or eight lanes going around it, there’s a vari­ety of buses, thou­sands of taxis, mil­lions of people, a foot­bridge, the Skytrain sys­tem and walk­way, mar­ket­places, with four major lanes com­ing in to the monu­ment from North, South, East and West. It’s may­hem, chaos of traffic for motor vehicles as well as for human beings. It’s a melt­ing pot of activ­ity, move­ment and space. So when you stand there and say, ‘ok, we are now respond­ing as artists to this space, to a his­tory, how do we place pub­lic art into an envir­on­ment that is so dense and has so much going on?’”

Part Two: Explor­ing the dis­tinct parts of the site, and Vic­tory Monument’s his­tory as the “zero marker” for Thai­l­and.

Maria Stukoff: “As artists com­ing in to the Vic­tory Monu­ment space, it’s very clear that there are four dis­tinct corners, flank­ing the four major traffic arter­ies. Each area has it’s own dis­tinct char­ac­ter; there’s Vic­tory Point, where you have mar­kets, food, eat­ing, night­time sit­ting, there’s another area which is home to the fam­ous Boat Noodle canteens, another side is very much about shops, buses, lot­tery tick­ets, which is quite dense, not a lot of trees in this area, and then on the other side there’s the hos­pital, which is more of a shop­ping mall, which has per­man­ent shops, a wide board­walk in the cen­ter of it, and a slower pace.

“So, a lot of our research was about how to engage with all these dif­fer­ent char­ac­ters, and very much about how does Vic­tory Monu­ment itself, the his­tory of this place, unfold into the areas. We star­ted by doing a lot of vox pops with the people who work there, stu­dents, traffic war­dens, just to get a feel for how they describe Vic­tory Monu­ment. That was very inter­est­ing for us to see the vari­ety of ideas, of what this means. One thing was com­mon to every­one: no one quite knew what Vic­tory Monu­ment was foun­ded for, what it’s his­tory or pur­pose was from the out­set. And when we delved a little more into his­tory, we found that Vic­tory Monu­ment not only had a pur­pose in terms of com­mem­or­at­ing the death of sol­diers from a par­tic­u­lar war, it was also used as zero marker for people com­ing in to Bangkok from the outer provinces, to know which way to turn… so this sol­dier hold­ing the rifle, gren­ade or vari­ous objects, tells you which way to go.”

Part Three: Who uses the Vic­tory Monu­ment site?

Kasama Yamtree: “We always keep in mind that this is for the pub­lic, it’s pub­lic art… We think it could be a great pos­sib­il­ity for future changes if we put some­thing there that every­one can under­stand very eas­ily. So that’s why we did inter­views with dif­fer­ent people who use the site; from people just walk­ing past, to people going from the bus to the BTS, the fruit seller or cof­fee seller. That is why we have put dif­fer­ent issues into our artwork.”

Maria Stukoff: “People became quite an issue, because we real­ised that the main exper­i­ence com­ing in to Vic­tory Monu­ment is traffic. Pol­lu­tion, cars, buses, bel­low­ing smoke from exhaust pipes, and on the outer rim you’ve got this busi­ness of people try­ing to avoid col­li­sions with each other. So we felt we wanted to do an art­work which high­lighted the effect of Vic­tory Monu­ment on people, and to give people a voice for the future, to go, ‘maybe we would like to change Bangkok’.”

Have you ever vis­ited Vic­tory Monu­ment? What were your impres­sions of the site? Which of the km.0 inter­ven­tions would you like to learn more about? Join the dis­cus­sion by shar­ing a com­ment below.