Poems of Séamas Cain
     
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WAR REQUIEM

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FREE PARKING, a performance
by Séamas Cain

Copyright © 2002, by Séamas Cain

Written for Varsha Nair and Savinee Buranasilapin

August 14 through August 31, 2002
at the Art Gallery of the
Centre of Academic Resources for
Chulalongkorn University in
Bangkok, Thailand


PROLOGUE

There is controversy and debate throughout the city of Bangkok. Will the city-authorities build a car-park for an art museum – or an art museum for a car-park?! In response, the artist Varsha Nair and the architect Savinee Buranasilapin have created a site-specific Art Installation FREE PARKING.

Varsha Nair: "I turn this exhibition-space into a parking area! The existing space remains unchanged – it is merely inhabited differently. In turn, it is also entirely possible to enter car-park spaces to create new and different situations without changing the original function of the place. It’s a question of how to engage people through the experience of art within the integral experience of the city."

Séamas Cain: "Text and counter-Text, we cannot understand the Past – unless we catch the Future in the Present! Let us begin!"


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SEVEN SCENES – WITH INTERLUDES – OF "FREE PARKING"


Violet mist? Or is it a brown cloud of pollution?
And, what happened to all those Thailand otters?
FREE PARKING is a challenge to the world of
rugged individualism, lone-wolf individualism!





SUNBURN CRESS
LINE TAKE US
MILD SNARL
A STITCHING


SPARROWS IN
ASPHYXIA CRY
A PINETREE
NOT SPITTLE


VOLTIC MASK
THE FISHLINE
INCANDESCENT
HARD SCRAG



FREE PARKING is a challenge to the mindless
ubiquity and the miasma of globalization!

Oooooooooooooooooooooooooo!


A LOVE-WAIL
SOLIDIFIED AS
A CYME LAND
I COLLIDE


NUN DIRT TOMB
STRANDTONGUE
SPLINTERWELD
MEGRIMS



Will the car-park serve the City? or a real Community?

Will the car-park serve the arts? or merely
the inviable spread of CocaCola culture?


Will the car-park attendants be
picaresque, peripatetic and Faustian?


"Free Parking" is the synecdoche
of Bangkok as the "City in the Sun"!