
Magdelena Correa
Spain
September 2019
This residency is kindly supported by
The Spanish Embassy in Bangkok

During the months of September 2019 through the Chilean artist, Magdalena Correa that has lived in Spain for more than 23 years. she came to Thailand with her assistant Nieves Arpa, to portray Bangkok from another perspective.
She explores the relationship between humans and the territories in which they live in. She uses photography and video Art to show her vision of her projects.

She use photography and video to report and to investigate isolated territories that the human being still inhabits. It is because of this isolation that people no longer care about them and that is why they are my main interest.
She has done these kind of projects for a lot of year now. They last about two years. What she do first is to investigate the place she want to go and she look for her own financing and resources to carry it out. Then she goes to the place and explore it and after that comes the summary and screening of the photography and the development of the videos.
In the end, the heart of the project is why people live in those places where nature is indomitable, where people have to adapt to the territory.


when she came here she found other things that were more interesting. The first things that came into her mind was a bit anecdotic so she had to change the idea.
Magdalena Correa and Nieves Arpa explored the city with the Chao Phraya River as the epicenter. They came up with the idea of representing Bangkok as a human body. That concrete line was about focusing in the river Chao Phraya itself as a backbone, as a spine that gives strength and connects everything; the cables that are seen in the streets are the limbs and give continuity to every corner of this chaotic map. To do this, everyday we disembarked from the public boat at each stop. There we found a lot of cables that proliferated throughout the city in a saturated and exaggerated way, being metaphorically the extremities of the city.
They started at the Taksin Bridge, navigating and discovering the River and its coasts and canal. Their work methodology is to take the Chao Phraya Express Boat and drop off in a different pier every day in order to explore this huge area. Nonthaburi pier, Khlong Toei, Prannok, Silom, Sathon, Nana… They have been all around and there is still a lot to be found.