The project Add. 12210 34.A.a investigates the act of reference as a critical tool to unwrite inherited hierarchies of authorship and territory, through the registered form of a bookwork. The project title takes reference from the British Library shelfmark of an original palm leaf manuscript, Phra Aiyakan Laksana Kralaharn (พระอัยการลักษณะกะลาหาร), one of the most reproduced forms of bookwork in Thai history; each manuscript consisted of hand-trimmed pages of engraved dried palm leaves, recopied and recirculated across religious infrastructures within Southeast Asia. Today, most surviving manuscripts are stored in the British Library as part of the rare archival possessions offered to form diplomatic ties. These manuscripts are under a system of catalogue, access is mediated through controlled protocols where photography is prohibited. Its contents and meaning are deliberately not made for immediate access; instead its location, classification, and storage are only means to navigate and request access following the territorial grammar imposed by the institution. The manuscript exists today not as a living legal documentation, but as a codified artefact whose access is governed by systems of ownership and control.

Materially, the book enacts itself as another product of the institution, juxtaposing its original classification and materiality. The bookcovers are crafted blocks of wood, bound in western bookcloth, displacing the traditional Sarong fabric that once were used to preserve the manuscripts. The materials used to craft the bookwork were products of materially accessible means: inkjet printing, sugar paper, plywood all of which subtly echoes the historical accessibility of the palm leaves while resituating the object within contemporary modes of production.

The book is then uncomfortably balanced on the stand. Scale, dimensions, and proportions were designed to resist how the book is placed and read; instead it enforces the book to be held and carefully handled, leaving the stand as just an apparatus to hold. To read, effort is required, repositioning and negotiation is demanded. The stand no longer serves as neutral support, it becomes complicit in restricting access. Opened, partially revealed, or held in motion, the book refuses passive consumption and reframes reading as part of a continuous labour.

Through these decisions, the book becomes a discrete apparatus that performs the politics of storage, access, and regulation. Land and language are altered as variables of this logic; codified, accumulated and continually reclassified. The object argues that what we inherit as knowledge is inseparable from their own institutions that codify them, and through copying, accumulating, and obscuring acts as both a container of truth and also a site where truth is manufactured, withheld, and contested - a counter archive that operates from within the very logic it critiques.