Making the Unknown Known (2023) by Wantanee Siripattananuntakul

Making the Unknown Known investigates how living beings and environments are transformed into political, economic, and territorial assets in Southeast Asia. Through a three-channel installation, the work examines how state power, global markets, and infrastructural systems reorganise life by converting it into property, commodities, and resources to be managed.

The installation unfolds through three parallel figures. The white elephant appears as a royal possession and political instrument, revealing how animal life is absorbed into systems of sovereignty and warfare. The grey parrot circulates through luxury markets and transnational trade networks, exposing how living beings are commodified and exchanged as status objects. Between them, images of the Mekong River during periods of extreme drought register how water systems are reorganised through dam construction, territorial planning, and cross-border governance.

Rather than presenting these processes as abstract structures, the work traces how power operates through rituals, trade routes, infrastructures, and everyday practices. Authority is not only exercised through laws and institutions, but through the material transformation of bodies, habitats, and circulation routes.

By placing symbolic authority, economic exchange, and environmental extraction side by side, Making the Unknown Known reveals how multispecies life is governed through overlapping regimes of control. The work frames extinction, displacement, and ecological transformation not as accidents of development, but as consequences of systems that turn life itself into a political and economic asset.