The title is a reference to Audre Lorde’s essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” published in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Crossing Press, 1984).

Puangsoi Aksornsawang’s A Draft of Dead Birds was a live performance that blurred the lines between cinema, literature, and performance art. Rooted in the artist’s personal experiences and negotiations with prescriptive identity politics, and incorporating news coverage of recurring political disappearances, Puangsoi’s performance critically interrogated the ethics of representation and the fragility of truth in collective memory. In the performance, she homed in not on the sensationalized event of disappearance itself, but on the complex, messy process of sense-making.

The performance first began as a film script that drew from two seemingly unrelated incidents in Puangsoi’s life: the unexplained death of a soldier at a Thai military school and the decay of a dead bird on her balcony. Both events, steeped in ambiguity and unresolved narratives, inspired her to write a script for what she thought would be her second feature film in 2018.

The script wove together the lives of three Thai characters in three different cities: a writer who interviews the mother of the disappeared soldier in Bangkok and turns her story into a book; an actress in Berlin who is cast in a film based on the book; and a director in Singapore who wins an award to adapt the book into a film. Although the characters in Puangsoi’s script are strangers to one another, they are linked by a shared experience: all three find a dead bird on their balconies.

During the film development process, Puangsoi felt that her script was perceived as ‘not political enough’ to fit into the film industry’s expectations for a Thai filmmaker.11Despite devastating evidence to the contrary the West still clings to the idea as representing the ideal of how things should be done. By the very nature of their composition, funding sources, and power dynamics, film development processes frequently perpetuate colonial structures. The line between genuinely uplifting a story and reshaping it into something else entirely is thin, and there is an inherent paternalism in outsiders prescribing “how” people should tell their stories through cinema. As a result, support for artistic expression from Southern positionalities frequently feels conditional, serving Western desires for self-validation through the construction of an illiberal “other.” In one rewrite, Puangsoi recalled with a laugh, she even introduced a monument of the missing protagonist into her story, in an effort to aggrandize the political nature of the narrative. The exogenous pressure to politicize art from certain contexts idealizes overt confrontation, spectacle, and what theorist Rosi Braidotti refers to as a “phallogocentric” culture that valourizes rationality, dominance, and violent opposition, perpetuating cycles of abuse under the guise of emancipation.22See for example Rosi Braidotti (Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming.) and Guattari (Guattari, Félix. 1984. Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics.) on the molecular revolution for other models of “change” which is not revolutionary. Puangsoi felt that she was working against the very critical feminist principles with which she approaches her practice, one that creates space for ambiguities and multiplicities. She realized that in fact “everything has political aspects” and that “what I’m doing is also political, even without pushing it too far and too much.”33Studio visit with Puangsoi Aksornsawang on December 4th 2024. Her practice echoes Felix Guattari’s notion of metamodeling which rejects fixed representational systems in favor of dynamic, processual frameworks that accommodate complexity and transformation.44Guattari, Félix. 2013. Schizoanalytic Cartographies and 1995. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm.

Southeast Asian filmmakers and artists are often called upon to represent Southeast Asian subjects and concerns, but only through a narrow and prescriptive lens that eschews contextual nuance.55This is not anecdotal but structural. When I programmed her first film at a major area studies conference, I was told it failed to “explain” anything about Thailand. Faced with this quandary, Puangsoi felt that her story no longer belonged to her. Puangsoi thus enacted a powerful ethnographic refusal: forgoing the making of the film and staying true to her ways of meaning-making.

Puangsoi revisited the script when she was invited to participate in a three-day event Don’t Clap for the Rehearsal at Bangkok CityCity Gallery in 2020. In a performance that mimicked the pre-production stage of filmmaking, Puangsoi filmed non-actors reading news about publicized disappearances of people due to both political and personal causes. She removed specific names and replaced them with “I” and “You.” Participants read the story multiple times, changing the details of each iteration slightly to reflect their own experiences of loss.

Puangsoi’s most profound takeaway from this process was the overwhelming urgency people felt to share their stories—some confronting emotions they had never voiced before, often erupting with intensity she “had not prepared for and was not able to hold.”66Studio visit with Puangsoi Aksornsawang on December 4th 2024. This led her to decide that the next performative iteration of her film script would involve professional actors, prioritizing care for her collaborators over external demands for authenticity.

In 2024, Puangsoi readapted the script into another performance titled A Draft of Dead Birds, also held at Bangkok CityCity Gallery, in which she was joined by an ensemble of peers and colleagues including actress and filmmaker Prim Patnasiri, Ornanong Thaisriwong, a member of the Thai theater company B-Floor, Prapamonton Eiamchan, an actress who starred in her first feature film, artist and actor Wasu Wanrayangkoon, sound artist baitong~xystems, and Parinee Buthrasri, cinematographer and also producer of her first feature film.

Visitors entered a room illuminated by warm red lighting that was designed and demarcated to resemble different domestic spaces —there was a mattress on the floor, a wardrobe, a suitcase ready for departure, a couch, plants in pots. Upon arrival, visitors received a small red book titled “I Open a Curtain to See a Dead Bird,” Puangsoi’s original film script turned novel, for which she adopted the male nom de plume of Wayla. Through speakers, we heard Puangsoi reading stage instructions for the script. She then sat down with Wasu, one of the performers, to ‘cast’ them for a role in the film. During this simulated casting, they shared personal stories: Wasu remembered his late father who was a political exile and died abroad. We were not made aware if he was referencing Puangsoi’s script or his ‘real’ story.

Meanwhile, other actors constantly engaged in some kind activity, such as peeling fruit or reading pages of the script. The cinematographer moved from one set to another, projecting and overlaying close ups of the actors on the walls. At one point, the wistful German phrase “Es gibt nicht genug Sonnenuntergang für alle Vögel” (There is not enough sunset for all the birds), a reference to an artwork that Puangsoi once saw in Berlin, was projected over the face of another actor who was being ‘cast’ by Puangsoi. Like the images of the actors’ faces, the letters of this text blurred into one other. These live projections were juxtaposed with footage shot by Montika Kham-on, who was tasked with recording footage from the perspective of one of the characters in the fictional book. Through these various mediatic dispersals, Puangsoi diffused the singular authority of an auteur.

At the end of the performance, Puangsoi sat down and typed into a laptop. Her Thai words were projected onto the wall. She questioned her role in this event – writer? director? actor? – and what it meant for her to borrow from other people’s lives to make this performance. By shape shifting her personas—from female Southeast Asian film director to male novelist to performance director—she critiqued rigid formulations of identity, emphasizing instead that subjectivity is processually and collectively constructed.

Puangsoi’s performance invited audiences to explore the ambiguities of storytelling, focusing on the act (or impossibility) of sense-making rather than the stories themselves. Through the simultaneous deployment of multiple screens and languages (Thai, English, and German), mediation that reflected the emotional complexity of the live acting, the performance destabilized any singular reading of its content – Puangsoi’s film script. Truth was fragmented and pluralized, mirroring the multiplicities of lived experience and Puangsoi’s belief in the unknowable forces that shape our lives—”those things we do not understand but somehow do.”77Studio visit with Puangsoi Aksornsawang on December 4th 2024.