After many years of working on ‘N scale’ and navigating the complex ethical questions of my relationship to the fire at the Kader factories in Bangkok that forms its core, I finally made the decision to travel to Thailand to visit the site where the factory once stood and to meet with a survivor of the fire.
I was fortunate to be able to receive AIDF funding to make this trip in order to do this further on-site research and to make new professional connections with curators, artists and others in the region.
It was really fascinating to travel to Thailand and to visit the site of the former factory which was located about an hour’s drive outside Bangkok. I had expected the area around the site to be quite industrial but in fact it was very much a place of mixed use: residential, small businesses, car dealers, shops and other retail outlets, and a number of impressive Buddhist temples. As we drove out of Bangkok it seemed that we never quite left urban development behind, it just changed in scale, so it was difficult in some ways to tell where the city ended and the new province of Nakhon Pathom began. Eventually however it became clear that we were in the neighbourhood of the factory because when Chai, the Thai driver who was helping me on this trip, would stop to ask for directions to the exact location of the fire, everyone he asked knew about it and remembered it. However when we finally got the site itself, I was surprised to see that a new ‘gated’ housing development had been built on the site where the factory buildings had stood. And it seemed that neither the security staff for the development, nor the people who now lived there, knew about the history of the site itself and the devastating fire that had taken place there.
There was no memorial at the site, nor any sign whatsoever that this event had ever taken place.
Subsequently I discovered that for Thai people, most of whom are practising Buddhists or quite superstitious around the dead, it would be very bad karma to live on the site where so many people have died, and most people would not want to do this. The housing developers however had not informed the new buyers of these houses of the site’s history, so they were effectively living on a grave site without knowing it.
It was a different story at the Thai Labour Museum in Bangkok, however. This small but wonderful museum, itself inaugurated in the same year that the Kader fire took place (1993) tells the history of labour and the caste system in Thailand. It is jam packed with material and crucially tells a story of labour and ‘working class’ activism and resistance, as well as one of exploitation and abuse. At the heart of the museum is a display devoted to the Kader factory fire. Alongside a model of the factory, complete with workers jumping from its windows, are actual artifacts gathered from the site; a worker’s shirt, the toys they made in the factory, a notebook and a page from a ledger. Seeing these things, and in particular the name KADER emblazoned on a grubby shirt in the display case, made the fire and its human cost, so much more tangible to me, perhaps even more so than going to the site itself.
Accompanying this display of objects were a number of photos from the site after the fire, and a video of a TV programme that had been made 6 years after the fire, detailing the harrowing events of the fire and its longer-term repercussions.
The programme also interviewed many of the families of victims and survivors themselves. One of the survivors interviewed was Rasamee Supa-em, who I was fortunate to have been able to meet and interview myself the day before. To meet with Rasamee was a great privilege, not least because she shared her story with me, but also because I was able to tell her about ‘N scale’ as a project and to ask her if she felt it was an appropriate way to remember the tragedy, at the same time as trying to locate the specificity of it in a broader context whose continued drives for profit and expansion mean that what happened at Kader 25 years ago, continues to happen to this day.
She said “Yes”. “Yes. Do it.”
So I am. Or I am continuing to try to realise this work here in the UK and hopefully, when it is ready, to take it back to Thailand itself.
The trip was an important endorsement for the project, and many of the aesthetic decisions already taken, but it also created a new and deeper demand on it that I now have to return to the project with. A new sense of its participants and its responsibilities. New connections that must somehow be brought alive in the context of its meditations on disconnection and irresponsibility.
