A Situated Land aims to trace the record of the societal phenomenon of the disgraceful transformations of empty lands into ad hoc farmlands in Bangkok's prime area, resulting from the soaring tax rate in early 2020. By looking closely at a common tool the commercial and private landowners used to camouflage the assets purposely for a tax cut, one of the most accessible local plants, Banana trees were chosen to be the key player in this makeshift farmland mission.

With these springing urban farms, observations on the social, economic, political and cultural context of the incident were traced back, from the taxation criteria with the indication of ranges of plants required to the birth of local business and labour works that emerged specifically to this demand. This provokes the question of how plants and their care-taker were utilised as an alibi in the loophole for the benefit of both authorities and billionaires.

This project started with an effort to identify the site of incidents from the distance by tracking the records in several forms of media, all found pieces of evidence were still full of ambiguity and obscurity. Yet, the source that helps penetrate the evidence is the aerial satellite view of Google Earth, which potentially allowed the observations to be done from the eye of the machine, noticing the transformation of the empty land by witnessing the sudden disappearance of the wasteland and the emergence of the standout grided dot of the plotted banana trees during the following months after the announcement.

By sneaking aerially at the luxurious neighbourhood of Bangkok as the site of incidents, this piece of work captures and collects visual evidence of these societal changes by exchanging the scale and resolution of the so-called farmland and the banana trees, as a means to distribute and alter the way we looking at the existence of the land itself and the relationship of what has been purposely placed, built or grown on those pieces of ‘assets’, reflecting an endless act of corruption effort among the public and private sectors of the nation.