UK artist Maria Stukoff and Thai cre­at­ive group Apostrophy’S have star­ted work on a cre­at­ive inter­ven­tion around Vic­tory Monu­ment in Bangkok as part of Cre­at­ive Cit­ies’ Trans­form­ing Pub­lic Spaces pro­ject. Apostrophy’S is a group of local archi­tects, design­ers and musi­cians inter­ested in the fusion of sus­tain­able com­munity regen­er­a­tion, archi­tec­ture and media tech­no­lo­gies. They are work­ing for the first time with UK-based artist Maria Stukoff who most recently com­pleted an inter­act­ive pub­lic art­work in Liv­er­pool using mobile games and com­mu­nic­a­tion technologies.

Dur­ing the first three-week ini­ti­ation pro­cess, the team con­duc­ted an ambi­tious map­ping pro­ject bring­ing together online feed­back sub­mit­ted by the pub­lic, inter­views they had con­duc­ted with people work­ing, shop­ping at and passing through Vic­tory Monu­ment, as well as doc­u­ment­ing their own explor­a­tion of the site over a period of dif­fer­ent time inter­vals. Through a vari­ety of games, think tanks and field trips — the UK/Thai col­lab­or­a­tion shaped a com­mon vis­ion build­ing a cross-cultural frame­work in which to cre­at­ively respond to trans­form­ing and inter­ven­ing at Vic­tory Monu­ment. See video here:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhwrHN3rt_s[/youtube]

Key cre­at­ive build­ing blocks emerged from this pro­cess. Themes cov­er­ing recyc­ling, renew­able energy, the home­less, pub­lic infra­struc­ture and travel routes were under invest­ig­a­tion. The unknown his­tory and pur­pose of Vic­tory Monu­ment itself and the lack of “pos­it­ive” social space became appar­ent through this map­ping process.

Vic­tory Monu­ment is the start­ing point, the zero-marker from where the pro­ject can fil­ter out to other areas in Bangkok. The team see this ‘cre­at­ive infec­tion’ as a cru­cial part of their design and art mak­ing pro­cess in order to shape envir­on­ment­ally aware social spaces all over Bangkok.

The inter­ven­tion will be ‘unveiled’ in Octo­ber as part of Bangkok Design Festival.