PICKERS AND PACKERS
My Name is Marilyn, a Daughter of Sa-Udorn (2025), and Sending Gravity are two installation works emerging from the larger Pickers and Packers project. Co-initiated by scholar-activist Shahar Shoham and artist-filmmaker Komtouch Napattaloong, Pickers and Packers is a multimodal, ongoing exploration based on Shoham’s research into the lives of Isaan migrant workers and their entanglement with structures of occupation and migration regimes shaped by Thailand-Israel long-term bilateral cooperation. This cooperation highlights the legacies of American imperial interventions through the exploitation of labor power, spanning from Udon Thani to the Middle East and back.
Installed in the radar building of the Ramasun Historical Museum, Komtouch Napattalong’s new silent video work, My Name is Marilyn, a Daughter of Sa-Udorn (2025), confronts the enduring myths and legacies of American empire. Here, the iconic visual of Marilyn Monroe, found as a discarded statue (sculpted by former Ban Chiang sculptor Panom Suthiboon) behind a resort en route to Ban Chiang, reappears masked. Her face is obscured by a cloth mask commonly worn by laborers to shield themselves from the sun and dust.
This masked Marilyn reappears in Sending Gravity, an installation by Komtouch Napattalong and Shahar Shoham situated within the former American intelligence station, currently a Thai army camp, also running an agricultural laboratory site. Placed within a greenhouse, the structure is modeled after Israeli agricultural practices imported to Thailand as “innovative development”; Marilyn’s presence as a spectacle of the “American dream” hegemony gestures toward the
instrumentalization of agriculture and labour migration. Both are sites of spectacles of state power and disciplinary tools masking territorial expansion and subordination of the people of Isaan, reflecting the ideological underpinnings of empire and settler colonialism refracted through complicity between Thailand, Israel, and the US.
Sounding through the installation are three tracks by Pongpat Pasanjun (“Labor Veteran”, “Dog’s Path”, “Labor Veteran 2”), an accomplished Isaan singer-songwriter, whose lyrics reflect on his life as a migrant laborer in Israeli agricultural settlements, to which he has returned after the changes in recruitment policies during the genocidal war. His music underscores the fragility of belonging amidst exploitation and the recurring displacements that structure migrant life.
The first group of Isaan migrants built Israel’s Ovda airbase in the Negev as part of the US-brokered Israel-Egypt Peace agreement at the end of the 1970s. They were employed for this project as they were reliable labourers for the Ramasun Station as well as other US airbases during the American War in Vietnam. A decade later, to this day, Thai migrants, mainly from Isaan, continue to work as farmworkers in the Israeli agricultural sector. This was part of the Israeli apartheid regime’s aim to replace, weaken, and control the Palestinian workforce. Thai workers were killed, taken hostage, and injured in the Hamas attack of October 2023, followed by Israel's genocidal war. The Thai government has been facilitating the increased recruitment of workers amidst continued rights violations and unsafe conditions, aiding Israel with further exclusion of Palestinian workers and to deepen the control, dispossession, and genocide towards Palestinians. As the cooperation continues, histories of violence are accelerated, masked by unfulfilled promises of imagined development and territorial expansion.
These works, situated at Ramasun, connect the legacies of American empire to the present-day realities of labor migration, post-war neglect, occupation, state violence, and the political and economic paradigms that continue to define Isaan workers' roles within global regimes of spectacle, development, and dispossession.
Installed in the radar building of the Ramasun Historical Museum, Komtouch Napattalong’s new silent video work, My Name is Marilyn, a Daughter of Sa-Udorn (2025), confronts the enduring myths and legacies of American empire. Here, the iconic visual of Marilyn Monroe, found as a discarded statue (sculpted by former Ban Chiang sculptor Panom Suthiboon) behind a resort en route to Ban Chiang, reappears masked. Her face is obscured by a cloth mask commonly worn by laborers to shield themselves from the sun and dust.
This masked Marilyn reappears in Sending Gravity, an installation by Komtouch Napattalong and Shahar Shoham situated within the former American intelligence station, currently a Thai army camp, also running an agricultural laboratory site. Placed within a greenhouse, the structure is modeled after Israeli agricultural practices imported to Thailand as “innovative development”; Marilyn’s presence as a spectacle of the “American dream” hegemony gestures toward the
instrumentalization of agriculture and labour migration. Both are sites of spectacles of state power and disciplinary tools masking territorial expansion and subordination of the people of Isaan, reflecting the ideological underpinnings of empire and settler colonialism refracted through complicity between Thailand, Israel, and the US.
Sounding through the installation are three tracks by Pongpat Pasanjun (“Labor Veteran”, “Dog’s Path”, “Labor Veteran 2”), an accomplished Isaan singer-songwriter, whose lyrics reflect on his life as a migrant laborer in Israeli agricultural settlements, to which he has returned after the changes in recruitment policies during the genocidal war. His music underscores the fragility of belonging amidst exploitation and the recurring displacements that structure migrant life.
The first group of Isaan migrants built Israel’s Ovda airbase in the Negev as part of the US-brokered Israel-Egypt Peace agreement at the end of the 1970s. They were employed for this project as they were reliable labourers for the Ramasun Station as well as other US airbases during the American War in Vietnam. A decade later, to this day, Thai migrants, mainly from Isaan, continue to work as farmworkers in the Israeli agricultural sector. This was part of the Israeli apartheid regime’s aim to replace, weaken, and control the Palestinian workforce. Thai workers were killed, taken hostage, and injured in the Hamas attack of October 2023, followed by Israel's genocidal war. The Thai government has been facilitating the increased recruitment of workers amidst continued rights violations and unsafe conditions, aiding Israel with further exclusion of Palestinian workers and to deepen the control, dispossession, and genocide towards Palestinians. As the cooperation continues, histories of violence are accelerated, masked by unfulfilled promises of imagined development and territorial expansion.
These works, situated at Ramasun, connect the legacies of American empire to the present-day realities of labor migration, post-war neglect, occupation, state violence, and the political and economic paradigms that continue to define Isaan workers' roles within global regimes of spectacle, development, and dispossession.
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