Episode #216: The Blueprint of Resistance
“The socio-historic dynamic is in some way reflected in the spatial environment,” explains Helena Cing Deih Sian, an independent researcher and architect. “Having said that, history, to a certain extent, is displayed in the built environment, and architecture, and in urban planning.”
Helena joins the podcast to discuss her work, Being In Place. Her website describes her approach as follows: “The topic of memories as space-forming, immaterial markers of the city is discussed in the work. Emerging from her master's thesis in architecture and urban planning at the University of Stuttgart, the accumulation of memories and longing around Myanmar are channeled through her artistic research. Her works oscillate between spoken words and places of memories, discussing their meaning to Myanmar’s political heritage. The membership process within the process of remembrance is described in place-making and curated by counter-narrative and counter- monuments. The remembrance process is about the bottom-up approach, a grassroots movement in which the role of the civilian population and their (counter) narratives are discussed and curated.”
Drawing on the work of Claude Nicolas Ledoux, she describes how architectural designs communicate their function and purpose through their physical form and symbolism. It is the mechanism by which individuals or entities can express their identity in a city. This communication between architecture and people can indeed be a powerful way to connect with the history and identity of a place.
However, she also explains how this dynamic is not always a positive one. “Unfortunately, it is not always for good, as the two, history and identity, become representative phases of heritage for the governing entity.” This can become especially problematic in a diverse society ruled by a dictatorial authority, as the narrative of the heritage being promoted tends to favor the oppressive, majority group. “All of a sudden, the physical side, in this case the cityscape, becomes the platform and incubator to demonstrate and popularize specific narrative,” she explains.
Helena applies her analysis to Myanmar, and more specifically Yangon, examining how successive military regimes have manipulated the populace through their maintenance of historic sites and the cityscapes they created. “In the case of Yangon, the holistic understanding of history is provided by the junta, and is exacerbated by the authoritarian rulership over the urban planning units, leading to an environment that would only share the story from the junta’s point of view.” To put it simply, heritage is power, and so the regime has been able to construct sentimental narratives around those aspects of (mainly Bamar) history that it wanted to reflect back to the population. “The junta educates the people about where they come from, and who they are. And that is very much though the lenses of their point of view and their ideology.
Given Myanmar’s tumultuous history, this dynamic has translated into certain sites being more emphasized, with others fading into obscurity. She gives an example of how Yangon University’s Student Union building at Yangon University, which was infamously destroyed in a 1962 bomb following the coup, was quietly repurposed as a prison… which was then demolished in 1985. Then in 2017, a new Student Union building was constructed— but with no reference to what had happened a half century earlier! Helena describes the military thus “rebranding it in their own rhetoric, in their own terms, and that's currently the status quo.”
When Burmese society became slightly freer in the transition years, the Yangon Heritage Trust was formed, whose goal was to “advocate and modernize the perception of heritage and research about historical sites beyond these two categories of colonial buildings and religious structures.” Ideally, she notes, they wanted to “converse about the richness of the history that is woven within the urban fabric of Yangon.”
Here she brings in the contested history of the famous Secretariat building in Myanmar, which was built by the British. Helena describes contrasting narratives represented by this building: one emphasizes its historical, sentimental importance as the site where Aung San was assassinated in 1947; the other symbolizes the regime’s uncomfortable relationship with its colonial past. After decades of neglect with the compound entirely closed off, the building was allowed to be rented out for a time during the transition years as commercial space, signaling that the authorities wished to disassociate itself from the country’s multi-layered and contentious history. Helena remarks on how the junta’s attitudes towards its buildings mirrors the propagandized, sanitized version of history they force on school children.
That the regime has either neglected or collectively forgotten the parts of their country’s history that they feel are inconvenient is a sign to Helena that, at its core, “the junta is rootless… When you're rootless, you can allow yourself to do whatever you want, you're more or less boundless, and that becomes very dangerous when you are actually a government of a country!” This focus on the regime’s neglect is similar to the perspective brought up by Elliot Prasse-Freeman on a recent podcast. His perspective is that the Burmese military regime does not fit into the standard definition of totalitarian rulers as primarily seeking total control of the population; instead, he characterizes it as a neglectful ruling entity that periodically engages in acute violence. Similarly, in looking at how the regime handles historical and heritage sites, Helena wonders if it doesn’t show that their need for control supersedes ideological motivations. She notes that if the regime does not erase past heritage through actual physical destruction, then it erodes it instead either through neglect or commercialization.
This would also explain why the military regime ultimately abandoned Yangon in 2005, so the many sentinels to the city’s rich history would not put the lie to their own, propagandized version everyday. “They basically neglected Yangon as this very historical city, and left to build their own city [Nay Pyi Daw]. So that is quite a final solution for them, to erase it by neglecting the architecture in Yangon.”
And while Helena describes the somewhat schizophrenic approach that the regime has taken towards colonial and Buddhist sites, their approach to important places connected to ethnic and religious minorities is entirely dismissive. “Historical sites are more or less concerning the Burmese-related culture and not the other ethnic cultures in that matter,” she says, adding that it’s not surprising that many non-Bamar historical sites are barely known by those outside that group. They are certainly not taught in school. As one rather egregious example, she notes that while she has not found one single instance of a Chin site being preserved as a place of heritage, the military instead will publicly destroy Christian crosses in Chin communities, replacing them with Buddha images! Perhaps the only interest the regime has ever shown in minority populations is to present ethnic kitsch in an attempt to promote their “exotic” appeal to tourists and present the facade of a multi-ethnic nation
But where the people may not have control over their physical sites of heritage, Helena points to an agency within that the military can’t ever take away: the imagined space of their minds. “The remnants that would connect the people and their history is kept in their memories,” she explains. “It is the people who tell the narrative of the nation, and thanks to these witnesses, the history in its complexity is captured. Even if it's not visible, or visibly seen in the cityscape, the complexity is passed on orally from generation to generation. On this, the junta has no power on what the people have in their mind and will pass on.”
This is the hopeful note that Helena wishes to end on, and connects the past to the current revolution. “In the minds of the people, many either are consciously aware of the past or can only assume that that the chain of history is a bit off when the junta tells the story, and that the spirit of the resilient civilians demonstrating for justice and freedom is very embedded in the Myanmar people, which can be seen again at these days in the CDM movements.” She notes how the storytelling that takes place from one generation to the next becomes a sacred place that no authority can ever disrupt. “As long as we share these stories, as long as we witness things and tell them, I think this is evidence that the junta has not succeeded!”