Making Shadows Speak by Wantanee Siripattananuntakul

Making Shadows Speak argues that the afterlives of historical violence, displacement, and geopolitical restructuring cannot be understood through human-centred narratives alone. Filmed at sites shaped by former colonial control, abandoned infrastructure, and shifting borders, the work traces how political histories continue to register in land, movement, and perception long after they are declared complete.

The video centres on acts of witnessing beyond human authority. A more-than-human presence appears throughout the work, not as a symbolic device but as a distinct mode of perception that operates alongside and beyond human frameworks. Attuned to shifts in light, space, pressure, and atmosphere, this parallel mode of attention brings into view forms of political memory that remain unarticulated within official archival systems.

By placing human and more-than-human perception in relation, Making Shadows Speak repositions landscape as a carrier of unresolved historical forces. Rather than treating silence as absence, the work approaches it as something embedded within environments and living bodies, extending political memory beyond documentation and speech.