Information

Group members: Michael Joseph Salvador, Yanisa Chumpolphaisal

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The fieldwork routes taken during the workhop have disclosed and narrated Cambodia’s slow process of transition to democracy to us. Through many events, known to the public or not, the artists have exposed their version of the narrative through their work. Through mutual events, the public share different forms of memorial, formal or informal, personal or collective. However, the official memorials are frozen statues that are ordered from top-down authority, simplified and abstracted.
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Upon reflection on Svay Sareth’s work, he has a unique feature in which he destroys the process of making monuments by creating“Anti-monuments” as an alternative reflection of power. Mocking the official monuments, he creates one of his own independent monuments as a pyramid-like sculpture with scattered pipes on top. Svay Sareth explains… Tuyo, the Khmer word for pipe, is a common synonym for a relationship or link to a person in power. Molding a complex situation into a static permanent statue tends to alleviate the intensity of pain but also dilutes the memory into a merely disconnected past event. In this sense the more formal the memorial, the more forgetting, not remembering. Randy Vattnanas “Bombpond,” on the other hand, resulting from destruction is an impermanent memorial that creates a powerful effect to the visitor’s memory. This kind of memory becomes so powerful people would rather forget, disguise, or distort it.

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In trying to explore the individual and collective memory within memorial, we mimicked Svay’s process. But instead of recreating a new icon, in our poster we used a gesture of erasure and censor in order to recall the vague memory. Other artist’s ideas of memorial were then collaged in replacement of the official independence monument. Lim Sokchanlina’s “Fence” and Randy Vattnana’s “Bomb-pond” replaced the independence memorial, through a graphical transformation (animated gif file). The original monument was therefore broken into a fragmented frame. Each was blurred and censored in sequence to create a recalling response of the memory of what used to be there. “Fence” appeared in the process of transformation, also as a memorial, thendisappeared leaving thin air in between the monument and ground. “Bombpond” then gradually stood out in the glitch of the original monument, with its pond erased. The series resulted in bomb pond outstanding floating glitched monument.