Racharudee (Zhu clan), 2023 by Wantanee Siripattananuntakul

Racharudee (Zhu clan) begins with a family clan book tracing the Zhu lineage back to Zhu Yuanzhang, establishing a claim to historical and imperial authority. Rather than preserving the book as a historical artefact, the artist physically dismantles it. Its pages are torn, pulped, and remade into new sheets of handmade paper. This process is not an act of destruction for its own sake, but a means of questioning what confers legitimacy on an archive. It asks whether history remains “history” only when its original form, legibility, and institutional framing are intact.

The work approaches the archive as a material system rather than a neutral container of information. By transforming a bound genealogical record into dispersed sheets, the project shifts the archive from an object that asserts authority into a surface marked by selection and control. What remains is not a stable narrative, but evidence of what is preserved, what is omitted, and who is permitted to speak through historical records.

The project also investigates how time is organised and authorised through material and institutional structures. A lineage book seeks to stabilise history by fixing it into an official sequence. By dismantling and redistributing its material, the work returns historical time to circulation, where it appears as accumulation, erosion, and revision rather than as a single linear account.

The title refers to Racharudee, the first “Royal Museum” in Thailand, where King Rama IV’s collection was shown exclusively to royal guests and foreign ambassadors. This restricted mode of display functions as a structural parallel to the clan archive. Both operate through permission, gatekeeping, and the production of legitimacy.

Racharudee reveals how historical authority is produced through material form, institutional framing, and controlled access. By altering the physical state of the archive, the work exposes how histories are continually shaped and re-authored through systems of preservation and exclusion.