We had an odd feeling waking up today, because it was finally the last day.
And everything was organised, unlike when we left and still had to pick up passports and get malarone and get ourselves through the snow to Sydney in the first place, all on the day before we flew out. All we had to do now was go off to the photo exhibition, then pack our bags. We’d been to so many different places in four months, and come so far, that it didn’t feel like it could possibly all be part of the same trip. But the photographic evidence is incontrovertible. And also we have receipts. And visa stamps.
We made our final visit to the kitchen on the top floor, where we had our final serving of lightly fried eggs on toast, with our final slices of slightly coconut tasting bread. And bits of onion on top. And tomato sauce.
Then we shuffled around the room for a bit and sorted out things for tomorrow, we did our final load of sink washing, and hung it up in the metal window frame to dry, with the window open. We read through the months of itineraries again. We studied the Photo Phnom Penh brochure to find out where all the exhibitions were, what they were, and how many we would likely be able to get to on a walking tour. We drew a rough route map. Somehow that took until 1pm and we still had to pay our last visit to the Thai restaurant next to the hotel for Pad Thai again.
Most of the exhibitions we were interested in were somewhere near the main part of town; the French Photographer JR had taken a series of women’s eyes and posted them up large on the outside wall of the French Embassy, but that’s waaaayyy up the other end of town, and those pictures would be on his website anyway, so we had to leave that one for next time we’re in Phnom Penh and JR has an exhibition on the outside of the embassy…
The first exhibition was in what looked basically like a house, and there were some dudes constructing something out the front that required band saws and angle grinders, but inside you could only hear it strong enough for a mild headache. The photographer had contacted groups of women who had been rescued from sex slavery in India, and given them props and a studio and as a therapeutic exercise encouraged them to dress up however they wanted and create a character to speak about what they wanted to do about their experiences. Obviously some of the ladies came up with dramatic vengeance themes. But others simply showed how sad the whole situation was, or adopted personas of grace or divine aid, and said that they would like to help other in the same situation. Fascinating exhibition.
At the second gallery they had some posters up on poles outside that were matched to the principles in the UN Declaration on Human Rights, which was maybe having some kind of anniversary. In the same building were two very different exhibitions, set up in your typical airy, white walls, high-ceiling gallery space. One of was some photos of teenagers looking upset or bored on summer holidays with their parents, which I think was supposed to express what it is like to be upset or bored on summer holidays with your parents. I didn’t ‘get’ it.
The second was really cool; this guy had got some incense sticks and blocked out all other light, then set up some blue torch light from underneath and taken these ghostly looking images where the smoke seems to be a little too similar to a woman with her back turned, or a man kneeling, or something.
Across the road they had a provocative collection from a Thai photographer who had created a character of his won; the Pink Man. What the Pink Man does is walk around in a pink suit with pink shirt, tie, socks, shoes, the lot! No, it’s not Shane Warne on Jane McGrath day… he also pushes a bright pink trolley through every photograph, and has this look on his face like ‘Whatever is going on here, there must be some way that I can BUY IT.’ But the additional step, which really makes it art, is that he had been modelled for some photographs, and for others simply pasted in. So, for instance, they took black and white pictures from the 1970’s of cops beating the living shit out of University Students, with corpses lined up in rows in the background, or Democracy Protesters literally hanging still from trees, and they just pasted that Pink Man into the scenery somewhere, with his pink trolley.
It gets the point across. Another memorable picture is of some huge cube-shaped rocks in Indonesia, with this tiny little pink man cruising around next to them, trolley slightly small to purchase such vast natural monuments.
We had seen glossy books with samples of photos from all the exhibitions on sale at the gallery with the UN posters; after thorough consideration the books over food policy won out again and we acquired a book to take home with us for $25.
Nearby was the AV centre, where they had lots of interesting things.
1. an exhibition of standard front-on shots of Cambodian school children, but taken so that they mimicked the faces of all of those photos of people going into torture camps like S21
2. some great photos of some of the abandoned, half-constructed, or half-deconstructed buildings around Phnom Penh
3. some old old aerial photos, printed about 4ft x 4ft, of Phnom Penh itself, which show you just how glorious it would have been before the war came along
4. the AV archive, which is basically a Cambodian history museum, except entry is free and you can sit down at one the computers and search whatever you like in the archives of photos, text, and many kinds of videos like old news reports, footage of De Gaulle’s state visit in 1950-something, what Phnom Penh and the Water Festival looked like in the 1920’s, some kooky footage of a parade in 1977 presided over by Pol Pot, and also every documentary by the well-known Cambodian film maker Rithy Panh. We watched some large sections of his documentary on laying the first fibre-optic cable across Cambodia in the 90’s.
It’s an amazing place. Pretty much anything you might want to know about Cambodia is in there somewhere, for free.
The next exhibition was in a very modern but small and narrow gallery, of various Cambodian youths who the artist had come across out on the streets at night, but who had obviously spent ages on their ‘look’. And so these kids posed for portraits on such-and-such corner at night, but some of them have so much adornment and make up and hair dye or whatever that you can’t even really tell that they’re Cambodian. It made an interesting sequence.
A couple of blocks closer to the river we came across an odd site at the corner of Monivong Boulevard; cops were clearing an intersection and stopping all the traffic entering, and all the way up and down that street there was no traffic coming. Clearly something was about to happen. After a minute or two the motorbike guards turned up, followed by six or seven of the standard government variety large black four-wheel drives, some of which bore Chinese flags. State visit, or something. And they must have been visiting quickly, because they were driving pretty damn fast. So that was entertaining. But was really just hilarious was watching the intersection and streets refill rapidly with cars and motorbikes and ladies with baskets on their heads as soon as the cops moved a little bit out of the way.
We strolled along down the boulevard, made a right at the independence monument, and took ourselves all the way back to the hotel via our favourite (cheap) supermarket, where we found an easy dinner consisting of bread rolls and cheese and other related items, as well as some pineapple and yoghurts to have for breakfast in the morning, because we’d be getting a move on before breakfast time.
Then we pulled everything out of everywhere and laid it all out straight on the bed, and made a valiant attempt to get it al back into our backpacks with any major mangling or shoving, while also not making either the cabin bags or the hold bags too heavy. Or heavy enough that any one might become suspicious, even though both of our backpacks, I’m sure, were more than 20kg. And then we tried to go to sleep.
And we did start to realise that we would be going home.
Greg
