Your Good Heart 
Knows How To Swim (After Ada Limón) (2023)


(Photo courtesy of Bryan Steven Monge Serrano) Installation shot of Your Good Heart Knows How To Swim from the first iteration of the work exhibited at the basement of McMurtry Art Building, funded by Institute for Diversity in the Arts!  

A part of my practice is cyclical reflections of the period when my home in Nakhonsawan province was caught in the 2011 Thailand Flood. My memory of the period has shaped my commitment to working towards and researching climate adaptation, but also an artistic inquiry in seeking resilience in the ruins. Dreading future floods, I imagined a scenario where my family archives became water-damaged by the decades-long cycles of flooding in my installation series, Your Good Heart Knows How To Swim. Phantasmic video projections evoke traces of flood that lingers on objects; wavering water lines blur images. I was bracing for the impact of a future memory loss in times of ecological crisis. The installation rearranges digitally altered family archives to speculate on what might emerge from the water-damaged family archive and to reckon with the incomplete image of natural disasters I held onto as a child.​​ Through conducting oral history interviews, I learned to reframe my elders’ perceived “complacency” in face of climate change as a form of resilience and optimism amidst climate uncertainty. 


Here’s a video summarising the experience of the work :)