Cave Stories 0

This publication sits alongside of the exhibition Cave Stories 0. It is the first public iteration of an evolving body of work by Harit Srikhao, shaped by a story he has held on to since 2018 and developed during his recent residency at YDP. Drawing on local folktales and psychological studies, the exhibition invites visitors to descend into an inner landscape woven from photography, moving images, drawings and puppetry. The project grew from the 2018 Tham Luang cave rescue, where twelve boys from a junior football team and their coach were saved after being trapped in a cave in Northern Thailand for seventeen days. Despite the official narrative of the rescue as a national triumph, some quieter voices remained unheard. Srikhao followed the journey of one of the rescued young footballers from Thailand to the UK, where the young man went to study and later took his own life in 2023. This loss fractures the story of the miracle, revealing the weight it could not hold. From this rupture emerges a body-led work in which feeling precedes reasoning. Rather than retelling the story as a single account, Srikhao attends to its silences, residues and afterlives through acts of reimagining. Cave Stories 0 reflects a loss of faith in narratives and images that extract, while still offering a radical hope: that by attending to the silence and the void, by bridging fragments and allowing narratives to diverge and reconverge, the finality of a hopeless ending might be held in suspension. In this space, where time is nonlinear and worlds briefly intersect, everyone might be able to begin again, differently.