Photo cr. Wanisa Nangrongsri
Lamseang Garden (+ Mekong Distorted Soundscape)
When You Travel to Mekong Project, Part of MAEW - Mekong-ASEAN Environmental Week
28-30 September 2025, Nakhon Phanom
When You Travel to Mekong invites viewers to embark on a journey into the distortions and fractures within the relationship between humans and nature, presented through a dialogue between photography and sound.
The photographic series Lamseang Garden, by Supawich Weesapen, comprises five images shot on film that intentionally distorts color. Each image is layered with a sheet of green glass, working as a filter, creating a sense of estrangement and detachment from the actual atmosphere. The series portrays lamseang trees caught in a half-alive, half-dead state amidst a twisted, distorted landscape. Their relationship with the Mekong River is rendered “othered” through the irregular rhythm of rising and falling waters. In parallel, the work invites viewers to question human notions of beauty often bound to the constructed definition of “nature,” which overlays what lies before us, while also exploring the conflicted emotions we hold toward the green color.
Complementing this is the sound series Mekong Distorted Soundscape, created by Krai Sridee, Yuki Suwansopa, Anaparn, and Manunya. Built from authentic sound recordings collected along the Mekong River, the work blends, distorts, and transforms these soundscapes under the concept of “listening to the distorted soundscape of the Mekong.” What emerges is a new sound space, one no longer resembling the natural environment we are familiar with. These sounds are traces of a fractured relationship between humans, nature, development, dam construction, and the violence of power that have permanently altered the Mekong River landscape.
Together, the photographs and sounds reveal another side of truth: that the relationship between humans and nature has already disintegrated and changed.
This project is coordinated by Reverberation Area
Commissioned by MAEW
This project was also presented at HOP Club Library, Bangkok and Anybodyhome, Nong Khai.
The color-shifted film and green glass grew out of my thinking about otherness. Different conditions create different ways of seeing. The trees, forced to live with the altered rhythm of the river, become "other" to the river itself. As a visitor, I also remain an outsider to this place. Within that distance, I became aware of an unexpected feeling of beauty.
This led me to question where that feeling came from. Did I find the landscape beautiful because the remaining branches still matched our idea of "nature"? Or was the beauty produced by the landscape's present condition, shaped in part by the dam? These questions also made me think about the color green. Green is commonly used as a symbol of nature, health, and calmness, even though it is simply the color reflected by leaves rather than absorbed by them. At the same time, green is often associated with otherness or the alien. Layering green glass over the already color-shifted images became another way to question perception.
More broadly, the project reflects on the distance between humans and nature, not as an abstract idea, but through the experience of being physically present in that specific place. My practice often begins with direct encounters like this, exploring the perceptions and emotions that emerge from lived experience, and developing new ideas from those experiences.
