Bophana workshop with TIM ETCHELLS and VLATKA HORVAT
{ January 9, 2010 @ 7:29 am }
I follow Hu Fang to Bophana, where Tim Etchells and Vlatka are wrapping up their workshop. He’s split up the kids into groups to make personal maps of Phnom Penh, and they’ve done them geographically, symbolically, in the shape of the name of the city itself.
Now they’re brainstorming other possible maps. A mental map, a historical map, a map of favourite places, least favourite places.
Tim: A map of where there is water in the city.
Vlatka: Cats.
Tim: A map of animals.
Vlatka: A map of places which are not usually on maps.
Sella: A map of eviction.
Vlatka: a map of places that are no longer there.
Sella: A map of future.
Tim: people are making these maps even as we sit here. Governments, NGOs…
Chath: A map to find love so you won’t be lonely.
Tim: that is a great map. every city should have this map. This map you can sell.
interview with TIM ETCHELLS, Sheffield, UK
{ October 19, 2009 @ 10:19 pm }
YS: Describe your profession.
TE: Normally I go by artist, writer, performance maker, this long… (laughs)
YS: Could you tell us about one artwork you feel you’re proud of or which represents you?
TE: For example, a performance work that I made with Forced Entertainment, the group of artists I work with in Sheffield. It’s called "Speak Bitterness" and it’s a six-hour performance where the audience can come and go whenever they want, and the form of it is that it’s a kind of public confessional on which the performers onstage there are seen, or eight of those read, form texts which are long lists of things that we have apparently done wrong.
So we confessed to fraud and forgery, we’re guilty of coldness and spite, we never washed up properly or to the dogs out for a walk. We were unfaithful, blah blah, so basically it’s a kind of catalogue a long long long text, whereon these people onstage seem to want to confess to everything that human beings have done which could be considered a wrong thing. Some of it’s very obvious, like we murdered people in their sleep; others very complicated, like we enjoyed short summer days. There’s nothing really wrong with that, but it’s included in the list of things.
So it’s kind of an attempt by a group fop pl to measure themselves against the possibilities of humanness and human wrongdoing in particular, and it’s also a kind of constant live negotiation with the public who are watching, this "we", "we did this, we did that," a question for the audience, whether they feel included or implicated in that. Because it’s very clear in that word that there’s a kind of ping-ponging between the work and the spectator, and that’s for me very key to almost anything that I’ve done in any medium.
YS: And why did you agree to come to the FCP?
TE: I mean partly out of a sense the Keng Sen was somebody that I had a connection with from times we had met previous, that we had met interesting conversations that he seem dot be doing something interesting and exciting, so I think that was pretty influential. So aside from that, a certain curiosity about what Cambodia was like, or what it might be like to spend some time in that context. It’s quite rare that I would be able to clear time to do something like this, but I’m glad that I did.
YS: Why glad?
TE: I mean for any specific, tangible reason, I think. I just feel as though it will take a long time to unpack or understand in the broader sense what the trip was about and what I learned from it, if I learned anything. But I think for me, the experience of being in a space like Cambodia and Phnom Penh and Siem Reap was really fascinating, ‘cos I suppose culturally it’s very different than the UK, but it’s pretty different from any of the contexts in which I end up being. So it was kind of interesting, the field of the city, you can get an impression of the kind of life the people seem to live, how that kind of life is made in that kind of space, in a way that’s not very easy to process, but I think they’ll find their way through, so to speak.
I suppose the most interesting for me – it’s two things really: this whole thing about city and city spaces, connected to poverty really, the way that public space and private space, domestic space and business space, commercial space and the way that those things are kind of collapsed onto each other, the difference between the house, the shop and the street and sidewalk is kind of blurry. So in some way that I can’t quite get my head around, I think that’s quite shifting as a perception.
And the other thing that was really interesting for me I suppose getting that glimpse really of a culture that’s in a kind of recovery process after a pretty severe trauma, and you do feel very much as though, even now, it’s 20, 35 years since Khmer Rouge, or 30 years since Khmer Rouge, like the real Pol Pot era, but you still feel very much the kind of echoes of that, and you still feel this is a country that’s trying to deal with this impact, that was made to erase culture and intellectual endeavour. And you know watching people do this dance really between… this desire to recover the past, recover what was burnt or killed on one hand, and on the other, the knowledge that they’ve got to move forward. This recovery of what was lost or destroyed, this attempt to preserve, it can only be part of the way forward. You can’t live in a museum or an archive, you have to step forward in a certain way. I think it’s very interesting to be there at that moment for this very reason, and if we’re lucky enough, we’ll go back to see how they cope with that with that process. I mean to the extent that they can see these things. I mean we’re there for ten days, you a glimpse that’s no more than that, sure.
Ng Yi-Sheng