Phnom Penh

July 8-9

Phnom Penh was actually one of the most difficult places for me. Not because it was hard to get around and not because I felt pressure to cover the city from top to bottom, but because of the nature of the tourists there. There are so many large groups that I found it difficult to connect with individual travelers. I took the city very casually- more interested in walking around than seeing all the sites. My main purpose there was to get a Lao Visa and despite the unfriendly visa office (which is a stark contrast to the rest of Laos) I did manage to get my visa in one day.

Upon arriving at the Okay Guest House in Phnom Penh I quickly became attached to a driver who shuttled me back and forth between the Laotian Embassy, a travel agency, and various sites around the city. I spent my first evening exploring a small arts district and found a very interesting gallery called the Reyum Institute. It's a non-profit, non-governmental organization devoted to serving, documenting and enriching Cambodian art and culture. There was an exhibition of framed dried leaves with gold paintings on them. I believe the artist's idea was to collect leaves from all over the area surrounding the greater Mekong and paint his/her understanding of Buddhist attributes. It was quite beautiful.

After spending some time there and purchasing a wood cut made by one of the students, I went to Friends, a restaurant run by an NGO. The restaurant gives former street children experience in the hospitality industry. They cook, wait, and clean. A combination of students and teachers run the place. My appetite was so small at that point, maybe just because of the heat, that I couldn't even finish a small greek salad. I spent the rest of the evening walking along the river front amidst various couples, people selling snacks, and what looked like Las Vegas style Buddhist shrines. Its so interesting to see the difference between city life and rural life in Cambodia. The people I met in small villages maintain traditional practices of modesty. Relationships are not made public, and there is certainly no pecking in the street. Because the food supply is so limited, the rural population is so much smaller than locals in Phnom Penh. In the city I saw unabashed displays of affection and tall men and women.

The next morning I went directly to Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. Tuol Sleng is the former Khmer Rouge S-21 (Security Office 21) Prison where the Democratic Kampuchea regime detained individuals accused of opposing them. Lead by Pol Pot (Big Brother Number 1), the Khmer Rouge was a communist political party that wanted to return Cambodia to an agrarian society without commerce, intellectualism, and classism. In order to do this the Khmer Rouge recruited mostly young rural children between the ages of 10-15 to act as soldiers in the revolution. Some older young people joined the ranks as well and were basically brainwashed into believing that what they were doing was good. They evacuated all intellectuals, doctors, public officials and business men from the cities and sent them out into the fields. The city of Phnom Penh was completely evacuated and destroyed. Between 1975 and 1979 Cambodia experienced a genocide of its own people. The devastation was tragic and is still a very present part of life there today. An estimated 1.5 million people were killed, families were separated and the national infrastructure was completely obliterated (of course the nation still has its king and until he dies, there is no way the country will have a chance for democracy).

So, this museum is one of the prisons where people were detained, kept in small cells with no lavatory, interrogated, tortured and murdered. I went through the museum without taking pictures. I felt like it was improper or perverse to photograph the cells where empty cots and blood stains still remain. In hindsight, I wish I had taken pictures. As documentation, to make the genocide more public.

Its interesting that when I was in the death camps in Poland I took lots of pictures, but here, I felt like they weren't my pictures to take. The suffering here didn't happen to my people, how could I have any right to photograph the remains? This issue comes up for me because I curated a show about this very topic-- using photographs taken by US college students of the concentration camps in Poland. I set up the device of the camera and the object of the photograph as tools for mediating overwhelming experiences. I also described the photograph as a possession, a badge of one's experience. I didn't want to take photographs of Tuol Sleng because I didn't want to possess them, I didn't want a badge to wear that I could show off to others. Now I realize I could have documented my experience not as a badge, but as a message. As a way to preserve the memory and publicize the tragedy, as a warning to prevent history from happening again.

So, I saw the three floors of the prison- the first had large rooms with a single cot, shackles and blood stains. The second was made of wood with small cells. The third had shackles connected to long bars which prevented anyone from moving without the others. They would be tortured by being beaten, strung upside down and lowered into a jar of human excrement, starved, many women were raped. The Khmer Rouge even began executing their own soldiers. Everyone who entered the prison was photographed and these photographs are displayed in the museum. Many foreigners were also executed- Australians, French, Indians, Pakistanis, British, Americans, Canadians etc.

After leaving the museum I went to the Killing Fields where most of these prisoners were taken after interrogation. There are massive graves there where hundreds of skeletons were dug up. They were usually separated by gender and age. I did take one photograph of the memorial stupa which holds more than 8000 skulls arranged by sex and age. I did feel like I needed to provide evidence for the existence of the place.

Another interesting experience I had in Phnom Pehn was going to the National Museum of Cambodia. Many of the sculptures excavated at Siem Reap are kept here. What bothers me about my experience there is that once I saw these fragments of Buddhist and Hindu deities displayed in a museum, I was more interested in them than I had been while actually at Siem Reap. Why do I do this? Have I become so influenced by the "sanctity" of the museum that I can only appreciate the "greatness" of a piece of art if it has been deemed worthy of a museum? This is something that I need to reflect upon.

and so much more...