Lulled Into a Dreamy Sleep From Which There Will Be No Waking Up
ถูกกล่อมให้เพ้อละเมอหลับใหลไปเสียแล้วอย่างไม่มีวันตื่น
An immersive audio-visual experience by elekhlekha อีเหละเขละขละ | ~60 minutes, three parts
Lulled Into a Dreamy Sleep From Which There Will Be No Waking Up is an immersive audio-visual experience — approximately sixty minutes, three parts — exploring political awakening. In Thai: ตาสว่าง, eyes wide open. The title draws from the writing of Jit Phumisak, a Thai radical thinker murdered in 1966 by US-backed forces. The performance holds the audience inside the liminal state that precedes awakening — the dreamy sleep — and the irreversibility of consciousness once truth breaks through.
The work is situated in two events that catalyzed the artists' own awakening. The first is the October 6, 1976, massacre at Thammasat University, in which CIA-funded, monarch-backed Thai Border Patrol and right-wing paramilitary forces killed at least 46 student demonstrators and arrested over 3,000 more, as the military seized power that same day. The second is the May 2010 military crackdown on the Red Shirt movement, in which at least 94 demonstrators were killed — violence that unfolded within earshot of the artists' family home. Both reveal the terrifying mechanics of power when it successfully renders its targets as other: demonized, disposable, disappeared from public memory — the silence remains, as if everyone were asleep. This is not a story bound to one part of the world. It is about a mechanism that recurs wherever power needs an enemy: the slow lull into complacency and the disorienting, embodied experience of waking from it. It is built to be felt with urgency, as the same pattern takes shape around the world now.
There is no fixed seating. The floor glows with hand-coded, audio-reactive visuals and archival fragments as the audience sits, stands, walks, and composes its own path through the work. At the center, a sixteen-channel spatial audio system encircles Kengchakaj's prepared, MIDI-enabled grand piano (ฆ้องเปียโน), built to evoke a Southeast Asian gong ensemble. Propaganda radio broadcasts, recorded testimony, and documentary audio are placed into a spatial sound environment and set into interplay with electro-acoustic improvisation, simultaneously driving the live visual system created by Nitcha Fame Tothong. The architecture of the audio-visual system is the architecture of the work's politics: agency shared, no single voice carrying everything.
The first part holds the condition of unforgetting — introduced by October 6 survivor Thongchai Winichakul — the liminal space between remembering and forgetting, the profound inability to either fully grieve or fully move on. The second draws on voices that refused silence: journalist Maria Ressa and Suppasiri Wiriyasiri, who documented state violence at personal cost; and Audre Lorde, whose words resound throughout: "My silences had not protected me; your silence will not protect you."
In its final section, the audience is invited to play homemade gongs alongside the networked live-coding gong ensemble — memorializing, and creating a space where shared agency is not only remembered but also actively rehearsed and reimagined. Gathering. Listening. Refusing to be quiet.
Awaken.
elekhlekha อีเหละเขละขละ (Nitcha Fame Tothong & Kengchakaj) is a Thai diaspora, Brooklyn-based collaborative artist practice rooted in research that decodes contested memories and complex histories, focusing on their root in the Southeast Asia context. They were awarded the Lumen Prize Gold Award in 2022. Their works have also been presented worldwide including Barbican Centre, London(2022); Lincoln Center, New York (2025); Wonderfruit Festival, Pattaya(2022-2024); Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. (2023); DEMO Festival, New York (2024, 2025); the National Communication Museum, Melbourne (2025); and Bangkok Kunsthalle, Bangkok (2026), among others.
Kengchakaj is a Jerome Hill Artist Fellow and past Lincoln Center Collider Fellow. Nitcha has been an artist-in-residence at Banff Centre and The Sitka Center for Art and Ecology
THE ASK
We are seeking a premiere venue partner for Spring 2028 — a space that can support an in-the-round, floor-projected, sixteenth-channel spatial audio environment for approximately 150–300 standing/seated-optional audience per performance, with a development residency window in late 2027 or early 2028 for full technical integration. A concert grand piano at the venue is a plus, but a rental is an option. Currently pursuing Yamaha Disklavier piano sponsorship (Yamaha Thailand sponsorship confirmed). We have a preliminary audio system that we can bring in, but additional AV support would go a long way. We welcome co-commissioning conversations alongside our development support from the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship and Lincoln Center's Collider program.