Khvay Samnang
Preah Kunlong (The way of the spirit)
Originally commissioned for documenta 14, Khvay Samnang’s two-channel video work Preah Kunlong (The way of the spirit) takes land politics, resource extraction and Indigenous Cambodian resistance as its primary concern. Created in collaboration with the classically-trained dancer and choreographer Nget Rady — who is also the performer in the video — Preah Kunlong powerfully utilizes a lexicon of gestures and movement to point toward the need for embodied forms of knowledge and understanding amidst the mechanistic frameworks of rapacious development, which are threatening not just forests and Indigenous communities in Southeast Asia, but also worldwide. More specifically, Preah Kunlong offers a proposal for the language of the body to exercise what political ecologist Nancy Lee Peluso has called “counter-mapping”, a form of “critical cartography” that has been practiced by Indigenous forest communities in Southeast Asia to strengthen claims on their traditional territories and resources by defying hegemonic mapmaking methods, which have long abetted strategies of colonial rule and resource extraction. To the Chong people of the Areng Valley in Southwestern Cambodia, knowledge is transmitted through speech and body, and land is mapped through embodied methods rooted in ancestral and oral histories.
Khvay first developed an interest in the Chong people because of their high-profile protests in defiance of a hydroelectric dam development (Cheay Areng Dam), which threatened to destroy not only the largest remaining expanse of rainforest in Southeast Asia, but also their way of life. He stayed with the community for a short period of time in order to learn about their spiritual practices and beliefs, and as he came to understand their everyday belief in animism, he worked with Rady to develop an embodied language that could potentially point toward the communities’ relationships to particular animals, water sources and land. As Rady stomps, squirms, writhes, slithers and trembles against mud, water, bark, and rock, his body takes on the form of a moving map, and sounds of his body press against the viewer’s ears, creating a sensory bridge between the tactile and the moving image.