(IN)TANGIBLE HERITAGE(S)

Abstract

The White Building in central Phnom Penh was built in 1963 as part of a modernist vision of social housing for artists and performers. Following the trauma of the Khmer Rouge, where the city was emptied and an estimated ninety percent of Cambodia’s artists were killed, the intervening Vietnamese-backed government sought to repopulate the Building with an invitation to surviving artists to return. In intervening decades, largely due to government neglect, the building fell into disrepair. Many residents within the building were still artists and performers, but the community was often disparaged by government and segments of the press as a slum populated by criminals and sex workers. Since the mid-2000s, the Building has been under constant threat of demolition by developers backed by the Cambodian government, and the community at risk of forced eviction, replicating similar land-grabbing episodes occurring across Phnom Penh as part of a violent neoliberal spatial reckoning. Within this context, I utilise a Lefebvrian lens to chart the history of the White Building from the late 1950s to present day, before focusing on art and storytelling programs situated within the Building from 2008 to the present. I trace the upsurge in artistic endeavours and how they have become a way of articulating pluralistic modes of struggle for a diverse range of residents. With access to 10 years of documentary and film footage co-created by myself, residents within the Building and Cambodian artists, I explore the emotional sense of belonging and emergent forms of resistance co-constituted by the Building community’s connection to this urban space and surrounding street life. From this perspective, I argue that the dominant discursive acts of the more powerful can and have been challenged through the expression of the ‘lived’ and the elevation of everyday life. Furthermore, I argue that the very perception of space and the sense of emotional belonging that occurs within it can and has been (re)produced through these alternative interactions.