Calendar
Lectures, screenings, walks, and workshops at Sam Yan Commons and across the city. Admission is free unless noted.
Events are held at Sam Yan Commons unless another venue is given.
Next
Open workshop
You do not have to be perfect to help animals. Three hours on why people actually eat less meat, how to turn that into something measurable, and what to do on Monday morning. Everyone leaves with one small plan and a network to carry it.
Sam Yan CommonsThai
Five Sunday workshops, each closing with a Digging Hour
Listen for yourself instead of being fed. Five sessions on the political history of a genre — Thai songs for life, luk thung against the city's pop, reggae and anti-colonial sound systems, punk and DIY, and finally “world music”, which is not a genre at all but a bin Western labels invented in 1987 to file everything that was not in English. Each session ends with a Digging Hour: screens off, find the music yourself, load it onto a player, pass it round. Participants keep the player — no feed, no advertising, nothing suggesting what to hear next.
Sam Yan Commons11 & 25 Oct · 8 & 22 Nov · 13 Dec · 20 places · no musical background needed
With Sam Yan Press
“Exile does not silence literature, it relocates it.” Open to writers from Myanmar, including those in exile and in diaspora communities. Short story, essay, or poetry.
Submissions open nowBurmese, English, Karen, Kachin, Chin, Mon, Shan, Karenni, Rakhine, Rohingya, or other languages of Myanmar
Open rehearsal, Saturdays and Sundays
Protest and revolutionary song from around the world — the Internationale, Bella Ciao, Solidarity Forever, We Shall Overcome, Phuea Muanchon, March for the Beloved. You do not have to sing well. You have to turn up. Rehearsals begin in October and the chorus joins the final workshop on 13 December to close the programme together. The first meeting has not been fixed yet — write to us and we will tell you when it is.
Sam Yan Commons12–16 singers · no experience needed
Archive
Most past programs were recorded. Where a recording exists, it is linked.
Prof. Davarian L. Baldwin · Smart Cities Research Lab, Trinity College
Baldwin argued that what has happened to Sam Yan is not local but general — the pattern of universities and smart-city projects acquiring the neighbourhoods around them. Introduced by Netiwit Chotiphatphaisal and answered by five respondents from Chulalongkorn, Thammasat and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with the floor open well past the scheduled close.
Chao Mae Thapthim Shrine Saphan Lueang
Keynotes: Dr. Pat Pataranutaporn (MIT Media Lab), Prof. Dr. Soraj Hongladarom, Phra Khru Methangkorn (Wat Nyanavesakavan), Dr. Kamnuan Ungchusak
An evening that put Buddhist, Catholic, Muslim and Confucian readings of the encyclical alongside working AI researchers and social-justice practitioners, in a room lined with books rather than a lecture hall. Opened by Netiwit Chotiphatphaisal and by the keeper of the Thapthim shrine.
Sam Yan Commons
Kris Potranandana vs Kengkij Kitirianglarp
Three hours in a room built for far fewer, with the audience spilling into the bookshelves. The clearest demonstration of what the Festival is for — an argument held in public, between people who genuinely disagree, in front of an audience free to take either side.
Delicious Democracy, Sam Yan
With Documentary Club and Sam Yan Civic Design Lab
The Studio's first full exhibition, running 21 July to 2 August at the BACC. Architectural sections, axonometrics and street-level scenes imagining what the campus and the blocks around it could have been — and could still be.
Exhibition Gallery, 3rd Floor, Bangkok Art and Culture Centre
Sam Yan Civic Design Lab with students from the Harvard Graduate School of Design
Run in Thai and English with students from the Harvard Graduate School of Design — the same exchange that gave the Institute its shape, handed on to students at the start of their training rather than the end.
Delicious Democracy and Sam Yan Commons
Do not miss one
No more than monthly. Lectures, screenings, walks, and open calls.