Output details

Authored book (with attached DVD)

'Lo Zoo delle donne Giraffa un viaggio tra i Kayan nella Tailandia del nord', pp.172.

There is a planned English publication and DVD - ‘The Zoo of the Giraffe Women: A Journey among the Kayan in Northern Thailand’.

Number of pages: pp.234

Vajra Publications

Italian and English versions have text and images and are accompanied by a DVD containing an experimental Super-8 short film: ‘I Must Not Look You in the Eyes’, a dynamic counterpart to the written and visual accounts, as well as to their specific mood.

Black and White photographs were taken using a 1920s Kodak box camera and a 1960s Agfa medium format camera, providing a rare contribution to the most experimental contemporary visual anthropology and lens-based arts.

Please see portfolio for contributing data.

This research documents the recent history of the Kayan, their mythology and religion, which has been developed from field-work in north-west Thailand (2009-2010). The significance of the research is in documenting of the history of ethnic tourism through the systematic employment of vintage analogue lens-based media to providing an epistemology of visual anthropology and its relation to contemporary visual art practices. The book attempts to question the controlling form of photographic practice with an aleatory approach of radical visual primitivism.

Known worldwide for the traditional female custom of wearing a long coiled brass necklace causing a considerable extension of the neck, the Kayan are a Tibeto-Burman ethnic group, originally from Burma. Due to the prolonged bloody civil war in their own homeland, a large number of Kayan, during the 1980s and 1990s, fled from Burma to take refuge in neighbouring Thailand. In response to an invasive tourism policy systematically promoted by the Thai government in the northern areas of the country, some families, abandoning the refugee camps where they were hosted, have been ‘re-settled’ in several new, artificially created villages open to tourists, on payment of a modest entrance fee. Here the Kayan, their culture and daily life have been transformed into an authentic tourist attraction for Thai and Western visitors travelling in the mountainous regions of Thailand.

The book provides a unique example of how creative writing and vintage visual media can be fruitfully combined in order to give shape to a multifaceted work aimed at documenting one of the most significant contemporary examples of mass exploitation of ‘ethnicity’ and of violence to women in this destructive de-culturation process.

The research combines information relating to the recent history of the Kayan as well as to their mythology and religion, the work – based on a series of investigations carried out by the author in the north-west of Thailand in 2009 and 2010 – is an original contribution to knowledge in the field of the history of ethnic tourism among the Kayan.

The PDF for the English Version will be available in the portfolio.