Down the Drain: Tales of Reptile Coordination continues a reflection on the role and potential of anecdotal and analytical mapping methodology, focusing on environmental relationships through a methodology of fieldwork based on direct observation, understanding of coordination between different actors and rhythms, and grounding research into a notion of “material” landscape.

Bangkok urban pythons are again the leading figures to dis-entangle and de-familiarize a context made of failing infrastructure, logistics of displacement, agile feral ecologies, intertwined human and non-human stories, popular beliefs, and more.

As a consequence, the mapping requires transcalar focus, multi-temporal awareness, and plural perspectives to come together in the constructed space of a visual document, whose main overall aim is to translate and synthesize a plural and highly diverse set of data in visual documents without losing complexity and readability [1].

_{[1] Text provided by artists.}

BKK Opportunistic Ecologies is an informal research that focuses on Bangkok in relation to its ecological niches related to water infrastructures and waste mis/management. The rising population of urban snakes, and in particular pythons, closely related to the increasing number of rats, is a seemingly invisible yet massive phenomenon.

In the past months, we have studied pythons' favourable spots, understanding the main maintenance issues of the city sewage systems, followed firefighters in their captures, learnt to read ‘numbers’ in snake postures, and consulted fortune tellers in relationship to those digits.

All these entangled connections are synthesized in a large illustration, exhibited in `The Posthuman City’, 2019, curated by Ute Meta Bauer and Laura Miotto at NTU CCA in Singapore.

A drawing printed on canvas where the urbanism of BKK pythons is narrated through considerations that spread from urban morphology, infrastructural conditions, contextual ‘food-chains’ and socio-cultural aspects [2].

_{[2] Text provided by artists.}

Untamed Tales of Coexistence is a narrative “unrigorous” map aiming to describe the entangled feral ecologies of the city of Bangkok by focusing on the presence of pythons, displacing the human from its exceptionalism.

It’s a story of trash and numbers, interspecies cohabitation, organic and cultural matters, and failing infrastructures, imbricated, interlinked and intertwined.

The piece involved a situated research process: we followed urban pythons through the crack of Bangkok sewerage pipes until domestic toilets, detouring through contaminated canals, fortune tellers and lottery tickets sellers, ending up filming firefighters in their daily catches.

Untamed Tales of Coexistence is a development of the previous work “Bkk Opportunistic Ecologies”, developed in 2020 and exhibited at NTU CCA in Singapore, as part of the Exhibition “The Posthuman City”, curated by Ute Meta Bauer and Laura Miotto. It critically reflects on how storytelling techniques could communicate better awkwardly entangled ecologies, superimposing two layers of narration to describe an entangled reality, that stretches across ecological, economic and cultural matters: an overall multiscalar drawing, depicting a world through a series of encapsulated narratives without a precise hierarchy or focus, and a transversal narrative, a story, to facilitate a deeper read and a higher contextualization of the feral nature of the infrastructure of a city like Bangkok, while maintaining an immediate and inclusive engagement with the public [3].

_{[3] Text provided by artists.}