Montien Boonma interview:
Arte Amazonas (1992)
Alfred Pawlin
artdesigncafé | café library | Published 06 August 2010
This interview of Montien Boonma was previously published in the 20-page catalogue Arte Amazonas in 1992 on the occasion of an exhibition with the same name, 4-27 June at the Goethe Institut Bangkok.
artdesigncafé | café library | Published 06 August 2010
This interview of Montien Boonma was previously published in the 20-page catalogue Arte Amazonas in 1992 on the occasion of an exhibition with the same name, 4-27 June at the Goethe Institut Bangkok.
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In February 1992, Montien Boonma was invited to Brazil to participate in the artists’ workshop in the Amazon basin, six million square km of river and jungle. Montien stayed and worked in the city of Manaus which was once the center of the world’s rubber industry. For three weeks, he did research around Manaus and communicated with the local Indians and artists from other countries who were invited to this project. His work was executed with a lot of help from the local Indians and will be exhibited in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992. The Goethe Institut Bangkok invited Montien Boonma to show works inspired by his journey to Brazil and his experiences in the Amazon region under the same title Arte Amazonas in June 1992 in Bangkok. The following interview is part of a conversation between the artist Montien Boonma and Alfred Pawlin, founder of Visual Dhamma Gallery. Alfred Pawlin: How did you get invited to participate in Arte Amazonas in Brazil? Montien Boonma: The Goethe Institut Bangkok had sent some information on my work to the organizer. Rainer Wittenborn, a German artist who has held workshops and also exhibited in Bangkok two years ago, was initially invited to the Amazonas workshop. He also recommended me to the organizers as an artist from Thailand. Alfred Pawlin: What is Arte Amazonas all about? Montien Boonma: Arte Amazonas is an international workshop for artists in Brazil. The organizers invited artists to live for some weeks in the Amazon region and work there. Artists lived in 3 important cities of that region: Belém, Manaus and Porto Velho. The Amazon region is the largest area of the Northern states in Brazil and also the largest rainforest in the world. It is one of the last untouched regions in the world, but many industrial companies move in to deforest. The biggest problems are caused by mining and logging. The government of Brazil also wants to build roads through the jungle to connect various cities. Again, trees have to be cut for that project. There are also so many animals and birds in this region, many rare species including plants and fish. The Amazon area has so many functions for the support of life. It is also called ’’the lungs of the earth". To me it is also full of mystery and an opportunity for man to discover the meaning of nature. Alfred Pawlin: Had you prepared your contribution to the exhibition in Thailand already or did you only decide after going to Brazil? Montien Boonma: In this project artists were asked to work at the site and receive inspiration from the Amazon environment. I knew the book The Last Rainforest in Thailand already, and two pictures in this book gave my work a strong direction. One photo showed nude Indian women at work, with uncovered breasts. The other image was of people at work who put a cup to the tree to receive rubber milk. These two images inspired me to see nature as mother. I did sketches on this concept that were sent to Brazil before I went. During my stay in Manaus I went to the island of Terra Nova. I asked the local people for a huge trunk. The island is full of rubber trees, but the locals are sometimes afraid as the trees destroy their houses when they fall. I started to work on a huge trunk that was about 80 years old. I put an oval deepening in the wood and filled it with rubber milk. The elevation in the trunk symbolizes the belly of a pregnant woman. So I called this work Reincarnation. Then I discovered the hammock and how it is used by the Indians. The hammock is really part of their life and their main furniture. In my work I use the hammock to hold the trunk in a diagonal position. |
Alfred Pawlin: What do the breasts symbolize in your works?
Montien Boonma: As I told you before, one main inspiration were these pictures in a book of naked women collecting rubber milk. This metaphor of female breasts and milk made me think of the concept "nature as mother’’. In Thailand, we also think that the spirit of trees are female (nang mai).
Man on earth receives everything from nature, like humans in their infancy get food from their mother. But if a mother has too many children who want to drink her milk, they might exhaust her.
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