The Pilgrims
The Pilgrims
High definition single-channel video
8m:58s
This project was made possible by support from The Shadow Places Network
Cinematographer: Sukrit Srisathaporn and Cake Napatsorn
Editors: Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro
Post Production: Vera Hong & Craig Bender, Thomas Dicker
Sound Designer & Mix: Tim Mahony
Fixer: Kritanu Manokam
The Pilgrims was filmed in what is known as the ‘Bangkok Boneyard’ at the end of 2019.
The Bangkok Boneyard is an interesting suburban oddity, located about an hour east of central Bangkok. The Boneyard is the antithesis of the usual airplane bone yards found in arid desert locations around the world: humid, surrounded by weeds and medium density housing; the Bangkok Boneyard houses the carapaces of several large-scale commercial airplanes. Rumoured to be remnants of a pre-Asian Financial crisis idea, these days, the Boneyard is home to an extended family of ‘caretakers’ who charge the curiosity seeker a negotiable ‘entrance fee’ into the boneyard.
At the time of shooting, the Boneyard was primarily a haven for millennial tourists eager to document, an out-of-the-ordinary travel experience. Almost tailor-made for the Instagram generation, the Bangkok Boneyard offered an edgy piece of self-promotion in a pretty convenient location.
The video was originally made in response to the quickening loop between the production and obsolescence of objects within our age. Watching the video, the Insta-tourists take delight in navigating the ruined planes, taking selfies and photos of their friends in the ruins of mass air transport. The idea of ruin- a concept that once took millennia or at least centuries to develop, is now a phenomena that now takes only decades to brew.
The emerging popularity of Urbex and Haikyo photography is symptomatic of a single-use culture that was occurring on an architectural scale. Abandoned large-scale structures remain after corporate money and interest run out. Leaving sites that could be exploited as aesthetic backdrops for the apocalyptically-inclined photographic explorer.
The narrative of The Pilgrims is ambiguous. The young tourists in the video could be seen as latter-day pilgrims. They are people drawn to the ruin for unknown personal significances. The soundtrack is spacious and suggests a kind of torpid state juxtaposed against the obvious fun that the hipsters are enjoying within the ruins.
The video owes as much to the follies of the 19th Century such as Gustave Doré’s The New Zealander- a lithograph that depicts an antipodean sketching the remains of St. Paul’s Cathedral- as it does to our collective video consciousness that includes images of bright young things at festivals such as Coachella, Burning Man and of course the infamous Fyre Festival. Part Pepsi advertisement part JG Ballard sketch, The Pilgrims documents a high-tide mark of the selfie decade.
Obviously there is a tension between the original intent of our video and present-day realities of mass-air transport during the Coronavirus era. Our original vision of the footage imagined a near-distant future where air travel has been made redundant for some unknown reason- possibly a fossil-fuel crisis or the emergence of some new disruptive technology. Yet we are now watching this video through the lens of our present-day global lockdown.
The Pilgrims was filmed at the very beginning of the outbreak of the Coronavirus; we edited the video while the virus was still just a worrying news story in China, while the soundtrack was laid down during stage-three lockdown. Watching the video we can’t help but wonder: “where are all these young world travellers today?” The playful fantasy of obsolescence has become a banal reality.
