GIANNI MAIANI
Bangkok: Terrorist attack of 31st December 2006




    รายละเอียดเนื้อหา
     
     Premise
    The quality of the footage used in this clip is quite low. My eyes were totally grabbed by the events in front of me to pay any attention to the camera. I just pointed instinctively the camera forward, without knowing what I was really catching (sorry, but taking pictures wasn't a priority thing in such a kind of mess).
     The Facts
    A series of eight blasts rocked Bangkok on the 31st December 2006: six of them occurred almost simultaneously in the late afternoon, and the last two exactly at midnight.
    Bombs were put in various point of the town, as shown in the video. Blasts occurred in a market, a shopping mall, some squares, a police booth and in a trafficked channel.
    The pictures were grabbed during the last of the eight explosions.
     The Blast
    The core of the edited clip shows the moment of the explosion, but not the place where the blast occurred, which was at 70-100 meters from us (just few minutes before we walked in front of the phone booth where the bomb was put... a little delay... and this video would never have been made).
    The pictures show the subsequent chaos that derived from the blast. The clip continues with a second wave of panic, involving also the medical personnel, as soon as various suspect objects were reported to be found by the Thai authorities.
     Are terrorist acts starting to have a weaker psychological effect on people?
    From what we saw the following days in Bangkok, it really looks like that.
    Everything looked the same as the usual, except a higher but still discrete presence of guards and police in the most sensitive spots of the city (mainly skytrain and subway stations).
    Thai people were busy same as usual, and apparently nobody was minimally scared to hang around the places previously rocked by the bombs. Also the tourists, same as us, did not run away. Instead, the hotels continued to be fully booked, and the tourist spots were crowded same as before.
    I found that this was the best reply that the population could give. This aspect impressed me much more than the blast itself.. that's why I decided to dress up the core of the video with a "head" and a "tail".
    Due to the always increasing number of terrorist acts, the people is maybe starting to perceive these coward acts just like another kind of accident that can happen in the life... just as it would be a small earthquake or, in a more individual scale, as it would be a car accident, a cancer, a lethal disease.. Almost everybody has the fear of catching a cancer or a lethal disease, but almost nobody lives with the terror of catching them.
    If this transformation on the psychology of the people is really building up.. then the terrorist acts should be somehow redefined as "horrorist" acts, since they fail one of their main purpose: generate terror on people.
    But.. there is some chance for a terrorist to understand this ongoing change?
    Find the answer at the end of the video...