When you are dead you have been alive…
Spent some time at Bophana Center. Set up by filmmaker Rithy Panh, the center is dedicated to reassembling Cambodia’s memory. The visual and audio documents related to Cambodia have been destroyed or scattered during the Khmer Rouge regime, and a country without a past cannot rebuild itself. Someone (yes, you too) who has pictures, movies or sound about Cambodia can donate it to the center. It will be added to a database which is available for anyone to consult at the center itself.
In conjunction with Phare Ponleu the center also conducts a workshop for visual artists with Vann Nath, painter and S21 interrogation center survivor, and Ing Phousera (Sera), comic strip (well… comic?) and artist, as teachers. Young khmer artists are invited to create art pieces freely inspired by documents from Bophana center. At the end of the workshop the center invited Richard Rechtman, anthropologist and psychiatrist who works since several years with the khmer refugee community in France, to reflect, together with the students, on what they created. There is a long interview in two parts on Ka-set.
The core of what he said (if I am not mistaken): when you think only about the dead, you deny them their life previous to death. So if they were not alive, where do you come from, who are you?
CAMBODIA. Phnom Penh. 6/02/2009: Richard Rechtman, psychiatrist and anthropologist, at workshop for visual artists at Bophana Center.
CAMBODIA. Phnom Penh. 6/02/2009: Vann Nath, painter and survivor of the S21 Khmer Rouge interrogation center, at a workshop for visual artists at Bophana Center. Richard Rechtman : “Vann Nath is probably the first witness I meet who bears witness to nothing but forces the others to testify”.
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