Rosalia Engchuan

Rosalia had added me on Instagram a few years earlier, but we only really started talking when we met at Bangkok Kunsthalle during the summer of 2024. She had just finished her PhD and was trying to figure out what came next. For a short while, we even ended up working at the same university, before she later joined the Bangkok Kunsthalle team.

Rosalia Namsai Engchuan is a social anthropologist, filmmaker, artist and curator whose work moves between research and moving image. Her doctoral research followed independent film communities in Indonesia, looking at how cinema can become a space to negotiate questions around religion, sexuality, politics and collective life. Her own artistic practice has since moved further into questions of mixed heritage, decolonial thinking, healing and the different ways knowledge can be produced and shared. Today, she is the moving image curator at Bangkok Kunsthalle and the founder of the Futures Observatory.

During that summer, I asked if she would be interested in having her portrait taken. She invited me to the house she shared with her husband, her child Ava and their extended family. I packed up all my gear, jumped on a motorcycle taxi and eventually arrived at this charming 1960s–70s townhouse surrounded by greenery, and a fairly impressive number of mosquitoes.

Rosalia and her partner welcomed me in, and we slowly moved around the house and garden making pictures. Much of the afternoon was spent talking about academia, research, and what it actually means to try to build that kind of life in Thailand.

Ava, of course, had her own opinions about all of this and occasionally joined the conversation, and the photographs.