The exhibition showcases a series of Davisi Boontharm’s orihon sketchbooks, in-which she sought to capture the sense of place, the scenes of everyday, ordinary lives intertwine with extraordinary moments. Orihon is an accordion-like notebook in which the pages are connected into one long strip. They unfold, and fold back onto each other, capable to both keep the flows and to enable capturing and experiencing separate scenes. Davisi’s sketches are essays, trials, search and work in progress. Her orihon are unfinished, destined to remain and be experienced in the unstable state of becoming. In them, there is no fear of error, they are croquis adding up to an imperfect oeuvre that reveal outlines, hint at and open up possible narratives.
As a visiting scholar/artist, for her exhibition at the Public Space Museum in Bologna Davisi has selected some of her albums that contain sketches of urban spaces that fascinated her and worth discussing. They are from the cities in which she lived, and which has visited – ranging from Tokyo and Milano, and scarcely known small towns along the Croatian’s Dalmatian coast.
Davisi Boontharm is an architect/urbanist. With Darko Radović they have founded co+re, an independent international platform for strategic thinking, making and living better cities based in Bangkok in partnership with Keio University, Politecnico di Milano and the University of Ljubljana.
Davisi’s international academic careers stretch from France, via Thailand, Singapore, Australia, to Japan. Her research and teaching field is interdisciplinary and cross-cultural, with strong emphasis on environmental and cultural sustainability. Davisi has published widely, some of her research books include Tokyo Bangkok Singapore: intensities, reuse and creative milieu (2012), Harajuku Urban stage-set (2008). In the Search of Urban Quality (with Radović, 2014), Small Tokyo (with Radović, 2012).
Her passion for cities also finds its expression in artistic works. Davisi explores “sketch & script” as mean of knowing and the production of knowledge and argues for the importance of artistic sensibility in the investigation of the urban. She has exhibited her works in Japan, Croatia, Slovenia and Italy. Davisi was also member of the council board of City Space Architecture, Bologna (2019-22) and Visiting Professor at the Faculty of Architecture, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia (2019-23).