“Free Flow”, the theme announced by the Bangkok Design Festival, sounds ironic considering that the disastrous flood that recently hit Thailand – and especially its still potentially devastating consequences – isn’t over yet.


But the festival’s Flow intends precisely to contrast the one that has devastated the country. It’s already happening, thanks to the power of intelligence and creativity, with the exhibition organised at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, called “Let’s Panic”. The exhibition has a great impact on the public, turning survival in a monsoonal country into a show, highlighting the positive. But its main feature is representing the essence of danger, within and without.




These are the streams and flows of consciousness that cross paths in the midst of chaos and, in spite of the surrounding catastrophes, generate energy and form a current of seeming coincidences.
And so, after the flows of innovation in Singapore, here come the flows of Bangkok, which are unavoidably interconnected. And the cover of the art, architecture and design magazine art4d, which titles its latest editorial “Free Flow”, is dedicated to Gaia Scagnetti – a young Italian researcher who specialises in information design. She teaches in the Faculty of Architecture at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, and has recently concluded an exhibition on human interrelations and on the flows of reciprocal knowledge.


Speaking with her – perhaps because of her background in complexity science – helps us to understand the beauty of the collapse of this megalopolis, which doesn’t change either on the wave of globalisation or with the rains, but metabolises and regenerates these flows, giving beauty to chaos. It all seems so complex, and it is. But it’s a way of detaching ourselves from the Western World’s inescapable linear logic. Here there is no flow, but a vortex which transports us to another dimension