Umbilical traces the matrilineal bond between three generations of Thai women through a recorded phone conversation between my mother and me. The work begins from a biological fact: a female fetus develops with all the eggs she will ever have. This means that when my mother was inside my grandmother’s womb, the egg that became me was already present—our three bodies once nested within one another.

The piece reflects on how memory is carried and transmitted across generations—not only through genetics but also through lived experience, emotion, and voice. Here, the body is not rendered as an object of visual consumption but instead as a presence in and through the voice. Speaking becomes a form of bodily archive, conjuring intimacy, fracture, and the lingering presence of my late grandmother.

At the same time, Umbilical resists the Western academic and artistic tendency to study Thai women primarily through the commodification of their bodies. Rather than offering a neatly consumable narrative, the work demands interpretive labor from the audience. Its unfolding conversation, layered and unresolved, insists on opacity, asking viewers to listen deeply rather than consume passively.