RETRACING A PLACE OF MEMORY: Liberating an architecture of remembrance for Cambodia by nickireckziegel

RetRacing a place of memoRy Liberating an architecture of remembrance for Cambodia

Retracing a place of memory Liberating an architecture of remembrance for Cambodia

authored by nicki reckziegel

Directed Studio Research Project McGill University School of Architecture 2013-2014 directed by Prof. Alberto P茅rez-G贸mez

abSTraCT Emerging from a period when memory itself was a crime, Cambodia has suffered a discontinuity of collective memory. Cambodia has a rich cultural and spiritual history in which memory ebbs and flows cyclically. However, the four-year rule of the Khmer Rouge set out to create an agrarian utopia and obliterate the past, criminalizing memory and rupturing social and cosmic order across the country for years thereafter. In the past decade, religion and ritual have slowly re-emerged and Cambodians are reclaiming traditional means of remembering and healing. This remembering has the potential to exist beyond the metaphysical and be expressed in architecture, wherein architecture is a transcendent record of human experience. Bearing that considerations of memory are not universal but are constructions of culture, belief, time, and place, it follows that the architecture of memory will fluctuate in kind. Tuol Sleng, once a modernist High School in Phnom Penh, was usurped as the central prison and interrogation centre during the Khmer Rouge, before its adaptation as a politically curated ‘authentic’ museum. This design project reimagines the existing Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crimes, with its prescriptive and fragmented memory, to engage Cambodia’s own notions of memory. The design recovers suppressed social memories, banned rituals, and subverted practices while re-establishing the socio-cultural institutions through which memory is transmitted. A juxtaposition of the recognizable historical traces of the site with mnemonic programs evokes new interpretations of both elements individually and collectively. This thesis considers Tuol Sleng within the context of Cambodia’s past and present, using design as a tool to reveal a place of memory that both reflects and confronts Khmer life, and create a framework for the ‘bursting forth’ of memory within everyday life. The result is an architecture that does not dwell on or stand as evidence of past traumas; rather, it liberates a more meaningful consideration of memory activated by human experience.

Contents Abstract

PART 1: to sow

The Place

The Memory

The Approach

PART 2: to cultivate The Characters APPENDIX A. Contesting Cambodia

61 63 115

Endnotes and Bibliographies

139

Acknowledgements

149

As this wave from memories flows in, the city soaks it up like a sponge and expands. A description of Zaira as it is today should contain all Zairaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s past. The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the Bags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

PART 1: to sow

The Place

arChiTeCTure aS a PaLimPSeST I have come to understand architecture as a transcendent record a human experience, holding within its walls traces of past, present, and future, as an expression of place and of memory. Bearing that considerations of memory are not universal but are constructions of culture, belief, time, and place, it follows that the architecture of memory will fluctuate in kind. Emerging from a period in which memory itself became a crime, Cambodia has been compelled to consider the dialectic of break-continuity in its individual and collective memories. Cambodia has a rich cultural and spiritual history in which memory ebbs and flows cyclically. However, the four-year rule of the Khmer Rouge set out to create an agrarian utopia and obliterate the past, criminalizing memory and rupturing social and cosmic order across the country for years thereafter. Present-day Cambodia must be understood through the lens of its past. In the past decade, the sense of desperation has faded, replaced by an aura of progress. Though fringed by globalisation and inherently different than their prewar iterations, religion and ritual have slowly re-emerged, social ties are regenerating and, amid persistent corruption, voices silenced by fear are once again audible. In spite of foreign aid and official tribunals, Cambodians are reclaiming traditional means of remembering and, in a sense, healing. This remembering has the capacity to exist beyond the metaphysical and be expressed in architecture, wherein architecture acts as a palimpsest, as this record of human experience. The Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crimes in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, in its current state, embodies the traumatic memory of the Khmer Rouge. This thesis discusses Tuol Sleng as a both a material place and an immaterial one, a place etched with traces of history and politics, and considers its further potential as a place of memory for Cambodia, aiming to engage, beyond the particular act of trauma, the historical traces of the place, and allowing the architecture itself to speak of the events it has witnessed.

New Khmer Architecture In its lifetime, Tuol Sleng has gone through several instances of adaptive reuse, taking on different names and functions that each corresponds to the socio-political context of Cambodia of that time.1 From high school to interrogation center to genocide museum, the architecture has been repeatedly subverted and adapted to fit its new unintended programs. The site originated as a high school, Lycée Preah Chau Ponhea Yath, built in 19622 as part of a National building campaign following Cambodia’s independence from the French. Between 1955 and 1968 King Sihanouk directed the construction of 3,126 primary schools and 168 high schools across the country in an effort to reduce illiteracy and raise education standards to a ‘world class’ level.3 This Lycée, named for the Cambodian King responsible for founding Phnom Penh, was one of five new high schools built in the city. French educated Cambodian architect Vann Molyvann, head of town planning and housing at the Ministry of Public Works, oversaw this architectural golden age of what became known as New Khmer Architecture.4

Education development in Cambodia from 1955 to 1968 ˄ French class in rural school in 1960 >

The Lycée situated in Phnom Penh ˄

Ideal Modern High School The design of the school exemplified the modernist architecture constructed in Cambodia in the sixties.5 In typical fashion of government education buildings at the time,6 the compound was formed of four identical concrete buildings arranged around a courtyard garden and playground, which was bisected by a fifth smaller administrative building.7 Vann Molyvann, strongly influenced by Le Corbusier while adamant about integrating Cambodia’s Khmer heritage, valued hygiene, rationality and functionality in his designs.8 The four buildings framing the garden (A,B,C,D) were three storeys high, fronted with breezy galleries, and buttressed by staircases. Each storey was divided into five highceilinged classrooms lined with shuttered windows accented with molded claustra. These elements combined to create light, open, airy, and passively cooled spaces ideal for teaching. Sihanouk’s memoirs harbour a certain ‘nostalgia or longing’ for the educational system of this era.9 The infrastructure and architecture of the period were symbols of progress and National pride marking a radical break from the colonial past; they were built to last and to accommodate the full range of human activity.10 When the Lycée was opened, it would have been a place for eager children and teenagers to play and learn and for teachers to earn a respectable salary, providing access to green space and education in an expanding neighbourhood.

Primary School in popular area of Phnom Penh || College in Kandal Province ˄˄ Lycée Preah Chau Ponhea Yath ˄ Ground floor plan of Lycée Preah Chau Ponhea Yath >

reNamiNg The SiTe, ProvoKiNg The war In 1970, when King Sihanouk was overthrown in a military coup, all references to kings in the names of official buildings and streets were eliminated; Lycée Preah Chau Ponhea Yath became Lycée Tuol Svay Prey (hillock of the wild mango), named for the area of Phnom in which it was located.11 The coup placed Marshal Lon Nol at the head of the new US-backed Khmer Republic. Subsequently, the Viet Minh and the Communist Party of Kampuchea (dubbed the Khmer Rouge by Sihanouk) continued to gain control over much of the country, provoking five years of bloody civil war.12

Leaders of Cambodia over the past 60 years ˄

Prince Sihanouk building campaign, construction of over 3000 primary schools and 168 high schools

B E

0 5 10 20m

Discovery of S-21

campaign against North Vietnamese forces in Cambodian countryside

Mai Lam (Vietnamese colonel) tasked with creating museum

US B-52 SECRET BOMBING

Buildings A,B, D were re-adapted to create a new typology of detention

1980

Pol Pot and Khmer Rouge forces ﬂee to border region with Tailand

1979 Vietnamese take Phnom Penh.

KHMER REPUBLIC

1977 Second wave of bloody purges

Lon Nol overthrows Sihanouk in a coup

Duch became the director of the Tuol Sleng facility

1975

1970

1965

King Norodom Sihanouk autocratic monarchy

usurped and turned into S-21

renamed: Lycée Tuol Svay Prey (hillock of the wild mango)

Beginnings of the Khmer Rouge (CPK) opposition to King Sihanouk

1963 Khmer Rouge begin armed rebellion

1960

1955

KINGDOM OF CAMBODIA DEMOCRATIC KAMPUCHEA Khmer Rouge

Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crimes opened directed by Ung Pech (survivor of S-21)

Lycee Preah Ponhea Yath built

population

1953 Independence from France

1952 FRENCH COLONIALISM Heng Samrin President, Hun Sen Fore

PEOPLE’S REPUBL

Buddhism partially reestablished

UNESCO lauches the new visit circuit of the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum

2013

2010

Mass protests in Phnom Penh over contested election results. Parliament approves new ﬁve-year term for Hun Sen.

Parliamentary elections. Ruling CPP claims victory, opposition leader Sam Rainsy alleges widespread irregularities

2008Ruling CPP claims victory in parliamentary elections criticised by EU monitors

2005

2003Hun Sen’s CPP wins General Elections but fails to secure sufﬁcient majority to govern alone

Coalition, CoPMs Ung Hout and Hun Sen

UNSECO Memory of the World Register inscribed the Museum Archives

General Elections

1998

Coalition government, Co-Prime Ministers Prince Norodom Ranariddh and Hun Sen

2000

Hun Sen launches the bloody Cambodian Coup, replacing Prince Ranariddh with Ung Hout

1997

STATE OF CAMBODIA Hun Sen Prime Minister

1995

1991 Paris Agreement of Cambodia signed

eign Minister (later Prime Minister)

1990

LIC OF KAMPUCHEA MONARCHY RESTORED

Application for UNESCO registration

d by the PRK

1985 Hun Sen elected as Chairman of the Council of Ministers and Prime Minister

King Norodom Sihanouk King Norodom Sihamoni

KINGDOM OF CAMBODIA

POLITICAL LEADER HUN SEN Cambodian People’s Party/FUNCINPEC coalition, Prime Minister Hun Sen

socialist state (Marxist-Leninist ideology)

Buddhism fully reintroduced as the national religion by SOC

Assault on the Past Bringing an end to the civil war, on April 17th, 1975, the victorious Khmer Rouge rolled their tanks into Phnom Penh, ushering in a new era of terror, madness, and mayhem on an inconceivable scale. The Khmer Rouge set out to create a paradigmatic Maoist and Marxist-Leninist agrarian society which would commence with the complete obliteration of the past.13 Within 48 hours of taking Phnom Penh, the Khmer Rouge forcibly emptied towns and cities, marching their inhabitants to the countryside, leaving behind all memory of their past life, where they farmed the land as slave labourers. Phnom Penh, the national capital, became a ghost town, reduced from a city of perhaps two million14 occupants to only a few Khmer Rouge officials. Led by ‘Brother Number One’, Pol Pot, they declared the country ‘Democratic Kampuchea’ and established what became known as Year Zero. Two-thousand years of rich Cambodian culture and history came to an abrupt end. The Khmer Rouge attacked memory by putting an end to the institutions through which it was ritually, formally and informally transmitted.15 They abolished Buddhism, public education, economic activity, private property, markets, and law courts. Pagodas and books were burned. Families were deliberately torn apart. All intellectuals, including teachers, merchants, and doctors, considered counter-revolutionary traitors, were immediately sentenced to death. The remaining people were re-educated, their memory reshaped. Over less than four years between 1.2 and 2 million16 people, roughly twenty percent of the population, died by execution or from starvation, overwork, and mistreated disease.

City-dwellers are evacuated down Monivong Boulevard || National Emblem of Democratic Kampuchea ˄ Forced labourers working on an irrigation project, Chinith River, Kampong Thom Province, 1976 >

Puth (Pŭtth tŭmneay) was a nineteenth-century sage who prophesied that the country would undergo a total reversal of traditional values, that the houses and streets would be emptied, that the illiterate would condemn the educated, that the infidels – thmils – would hold absolute power and persecute the priests. But people would be saved if they planted a kapok tree – kor, in Cambodian. Kor also means ‘mute’. The usual interpretation of this enigmatic message was that only the deaf-mutes would be saved during this period of calamity. Remain deaf and mute. Therein now I realized, lay the means of survival. Pretend to be deaf and dumb! Say nothing, hear nothing, understand nothing!

Pin Yathay, Stay Alive my Son

“Do not know, do not hear, do not see, do not speak” While many schools were destroyed during Democratic Kampuchea, some were left “‘standing’ … at the very least as … buildings.”18 The Lycée remained, but was usurped by the Khmer Rouge as S-21 (Security Office 21),19 the secret headquarters of the santebal (internal security police) and the primary prison and interrogation center of the regime. Of the 12,380 men, women, and children who were imprisoned at S-21, only seven survived. The Khmer Rouge perceived a seemingly endless stream of ‘enemies’ as acute threats to the success of the revolution.20 ‘Enemies’ were transported to S-21 where they were photographed and catalogued and would necessarily confess to crimes of which they were already presumed guilty. Under extreme torture, victims would confess with detailed accounts to crimes of stealing fruit or conspiring with the CIA, implicating friends and relatives in their offences.21 Furthermore, “workers at S-21 could become prisoners overnight,”22 Democratic Kampuchea’s consideration of ‘enemies’ existed in a gray zone leaving each person questioning, “who is the enemy?” The compound was a contraposition of sound and silence. Screams and cries could be heard through the walls,23 yet the exigency to “keep silent”, the fear of hearing incriminatory information,24 as well as the silence in news entering or leaving the site created an illusory air of deaf-muteness.

Khmer Rouge Cadre ˄ S-21 surrounded by many layers of barbed wire >

Paranoiac Design The choice of the school, while ill-suited as a prison, was perhaps a symbolic perversion of Democratic Kampuchea’s despised intellectualism. In order to accord its new sinister program, the modernist ideals of the architecture were wholly subverted, rendering closed and splintered the originally open design. The classrooms were exploited through fragmentation, each room divided into a series of detention cells, while passages were torn into the walls to facilitate guard circulation and surveillance. The galleries were wrapped with barbed wire, the windows lined with metals bars, the claustra plastered over. All mechanisms of passive ventilation that once flowed through the building were disrupted. The entire compound was encased in layers of corrugated iron and barbed wire, rendering it off-limits. In this de-urbanized Phnom Penh, the grounds of the compound, mere meters away from mass-grave sites, were planted with fruits and vegetables and animals brought in to sustain the S-21 staff.25 Devices of torture were installed, yet S-21 also arrogated the school furniture and blackboards, recycling them to record confessions and post prison regulations.26 The smallest details of subversion could be some of the most horrifying, “on the stairway landings […] holes have been knocked in in the wall so the stairs could be cleaned by sloshing water down the staircases. Below each of these openings on the building exteriors one can still see stains of the blood that ran down the sides, as though the buildings themselves had bled.”27 “There is no possible fantasy of the sublime in this horror, no lyrical architecture of death, but the production of a terrifying reality with a gruesome administrative look. Architecture at S21 was reduced to an instrument of paranoiac bureaucratic procedures.”28

Passages cut into walls for guard circulation || Classrooms divided into brick cells ˄ Ground floor plan of modifications to buildings at S-21 >

“Authentic” Museum On January 7th, 1979, three years, eight months and twenty-nine days after it began, the rule of the Khmer Rouge was brought to an end as armed Vietnamese forces, accompanied by their Cambodian allies, liberated Phnom Penh finding it largely abandoned. In the days that followed they spread out into the city, eventually discovering the site of S-21, drawn by the scent of rot. The prison was empty but for the bodies of the final fourteen hastily executed prisoners and an extensive collection of documentation. The significance of this discovery was irrefutable and there was perceived an opportunity to utilize the site and its documents to form a comprehensive history of recent events. Mai Lam, a Vietnamese colonel experienced in museology and fluent in Khmer, was tasked with organizing these documents into an archive and transforming the site into a museum.29 Mai Lam created the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crimes30 as evidence of the crimes of the Khmer Rouge,31 asserting that the invasion of the Vietnamese army was indeed a liberation. Mai Lam, influenced by his own Museum of American War Crimes in Ho Chi Minh City as well as visits to European Holocaust memorials, frames a particular understanding of Democratic Kampuchea and designed a seemingly “authentic” museum, as if the prison had only just ceased operation.32 Despite remaining in Cambodia until the late 1980s, Mai Lam concealed his role as ‘specialist consultant’ in order to create the public perception of a Khmer driven initiative. Furthermore, the museum was revealed first only to international guests,33 cementing its position as a museum curated by non-Khmer for consumption by non-Khmer. Most recently, in 2011, the site was adopted by the UNESCO Memory of the World Program, asserting that “it is impossible to think of the future, if the past is not understood,”34 and furthering the foreign influence on the project. These considerations of the intentions of the museum raise the question of its appropriateness as a memorial for Cambodia and Cambodians.35

Auschwitz “Arbeit Macht Frei” ˄ Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crimes >

On every visit Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve been struck by the contrast between the peaceful, sun-soaked compound and the horrific exhibits on display, between whitewashed classrooms with their yellow and white tile floors and the instruments of torture they contain, between the children at play outside the buildings and the mug shots of other children en route to being killed. [â&#x20AC;Ś] On most of my visits mynah birds have hopped along the overgrown paths. Roosters have crowded around the neighbourhood, the sound competing with the hum of traffic on Monivong Boulevard to the east or, in the dry season, with music broadcast over loudspeakers from Buddhist wedding celebrations nearby. David Chandler, Voices from S-21

Preservation as Proof Standing witness to the crimes committed between their walls, building C and the ground floor of building A have been preserved in the state they were discovered. This preservation evokes the terror and despair experienced in S-21, the barbed wire still enveloping the galleries, the blood stains still visible on the floor. Other parts of the compound have been restored, now housing selections of the Khmer Rouge archive as a museum display. “Confessions, photography, clothing, tools and paintings describing the modes of torture and incarceration are exhibited, with a chilling effect.”36 In buildings B and D, the passages that had been cut into the walls for guard surveillance were kept to facilitate visitor circulation, creating a provocative superposition of the role of the guard with that of the visitor.37 Since its inception as a high school, Tuol Sleng has endured several alterations and transformations, each state establishing itself as the new normality but unable to completely erase those that preceded it. The traces – both physical modifications and ideological shifts – remain, linking one state to the next. “While the trauma may not change the object as such, knowledge of the trauma is often enough to alter it.”38 The Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crimes, as it exists, recreates the memory of the time of the Khmer Rouge, placing the visitor in a frame of fear, both of the events of the past and the possibility of their recurrence.

Exhibition and preserved space at Tuol Sleng ˄ Ground floor plan of Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crimes >

The Memory

To be Khmer is to be Buddhist It is important to note at this time that Cambodia is a predominantly Buddhist society wherein Khmer culture is virtually indivisible from religious practice. “The essence of Cambodianness is Buddhism, but Buddhism in contemporary Cambodia is essentially Cambodian.”39 Popular Buddhism practice in Cambodia finds its roots in a hybrid of animism, Brahmanism, Mahayana, and Theravada Buddhism,40 inspiring certain beliefs and practices particular to Khmer. Notions of impermanence, rebirth, and cyclical time permeate people’s perceptions and worldviews. There is an understanding of a cosmic order in which the living are connected to their ancestral spirits. In conjunction with all other cultural processes, Buddhist practice was prohibited during Democratic Kampuchea, effectively severing this cosmic order in what has been deemed ‘ritualcide’.41 Buddhism was tolerated by the Vietnamese-backed People’s Republic of Kampuchea following the end of the Khmer Rouge period; nonetheless, many of these practices have only recently begun to resurface following this traumatic disruption. Within the Khmer circular perception of time, the preservation of a physical entity such as the museum and of the events that occurred therein can be called into question.42 Moreover, Tuol Sleng offers a prescriptive and socially isolated fragment of memory or history; it does not allow for the flexibility of evolving cultural and religious practice, or the organically recurring memory known to Khmer. Manifested in Genocide Museums and official tribunals, many groups, based both in Cambodia and internationally, have gone to great extents to curate a memory of Democratic Kampuchea in order to ‘help people heal’. However, little attention has been paid to the particular and traditional way in which Khmer mourn and remember.43 Without dwelling nostalgically, Cambodians have drawn on certain prewar rituals and social patterns to express their grief and reconstruct the crucial cosmic order.

Monks collect alms ˄ Monks visit Choeung Ek memorial stupa >

Throâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; many a birth in existence wandered I, Seeking, but not finding, the builder of this house. Sorrowful is repeated birth. O housebuilder, thou art seen. Thou shall build no house again. All thy rafters are broken. Thy ridgepole is shattered. Mind attains the Unconditioned. Achieved is the End of Craving. Buddha, Dhammapada

Dead “Burst Forth” Respecting the circular precept of time, mourning and memory are also experience circularly for Khmer. This principle is embodied by the recently re-established annual pchum ben festival.44 Pchum ben, literally the ‘Gathering of the Rice Balls’, is an annual festival of the dead. The festival connects the living to their ancestors and specifically allows people to pay tribute to ‘bad dead’, those dead who died violently or were not honored with a proper funeral. As a result, this festival has in fact accrued greater importance since prior to the revolution and is considered a “central memorializing ritual for those who died in the DK period,”45 participated in by nearly all Cambodians regardless of religious affinity. Pchum ben takes place annually during September-October, at the height of the monsoon rains when the heads have begun to form on the rice stems in the field. Over a period of fifteen days, it is believed that the spirits of the dead who have not gone on to rebirth return in search of offerings from their descendants.46 Similarly to typical Khmer death rituals, family members offer food and gifts to the monks which they in turn transfer as merits to the dead to help them reincarnate. However, while typical death rituals are private events between the family and the monks, pchum ben involves larger collectivities wherein entire villages or social groups gather together to pay tribute to their mutual dead. The ritual involves the production of rice balls that will be thrown on the ground of the pagodas on the final night of the festival, facilitating a direct interaction with the spirits, not mediated by monks.47 The rice balls are in a certain sense offered to wandering souls as a shape for reincarnation.48 Khmer have a very close relationship with spirits; the dead can make sporadic appearances in the dreams of the living and make requests of them. As such, their memory is not linear, perhaps lessening with time and ritual healing; rather it is a circular principle negotiating between forgetting and remembering as the dead ‘burst forth’ from time to time into the world of the living.49

Preparation for the final day of Pchum Ben ˄ Families feast at the pagoda during Pchum Ben >

The Approach

re-inhabiting the site ‘Memory sickness’, to think nostalgically of the past, was an executable offence in during the genocidal rule of the Khmer Rouge. This design project reimagines the existing Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crimes such that it may reflect Cambodia’s own notions of memory. Whether because of or in spite of the curatorial decisions regarding Tuol Sleng, the traces, both physical and metaphysical, of human experience are evident on the site. The existing museum exhibits the horrors of the Khmer Rouge as a type of documented re-enactment, a prison frozen in time. Given the Khmer practice of memory, I think that these traces hold a greater potential, beyond the prescriptive, to create a framework for this involuntary ‘bursting forth’ within everyday life. Overall, the approach is to invite everyday life and human activity to re-inhabit the site, recovering lost social memories, banned rituals, and subverted practices while reestablishing the socio-cultural institutions through which memory is transmitted. The site is re-integrated into the urban grid, boundaries are redefined, the architecture is adapted both for new programs and to accentuate the spectrum of the history of the place.

Conceptual collage of everyday programs engaging the site >

Designing Radical Superpositions Explicit imagery is excluded in favour of mnemonic metaphors and quotidian programs, creating a framework for the ‘bursting forth’ of memory at any given time. Certain mnemonic imaginaries are juxtaposed with the recognizable historical traces of the site; this allows new interpretations to be triggered of both elements individually and collectively. For instance, rice farming, once a traditional means to livelihood, was a heavily corrupted practice of forced labour during Democratic Kampuchea. In situ today, a rice field implies nothing more than a rice field. However, by radically superimposing the practice of rice farming with the notoriety of the Tuol Sleng site, new readings can emerge. The rice field, a mnemonic program, becomes at once nostalgic, sinister, and innovative. Memories of prewar rural ways of life intermingle with recollections of urbanicide and forced labour under the Khmer Rouge,50 bound together with the necessity of progress and transmission of knowledge to future generations. The field is productive, its harvest used to celebrate pchum ben, literally the ‘Gathering of the Rice Balls’, a festival in which the living pay tribute to the ‘bad dead’ such as those who were killed during the Khmer Rouge. The layering of the rice field on the site also suggests a rebirth in the life cycle of the site. The site is once more renamed, no longer Tuol Sleng ‘hillock of the poisonous tree’, it is now Tuol Smartei ‘hillock of memory’, wherein the word memory in Khmer is defined as spirit, imagination, consciousness, will, and presence of mind.

Radical superposition of mnemonic program and historical site >

But this is the characteristic of involuntary memory: it internalizes the context, it makes the past context inseparable from the present sensation. Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs

Conceptual collage of overall design approach Ë&#x201E;

The everyday and the memory The rice field becomes the central element to two main types of encounter with the site. The first is that of the user, the everyday activities of the community, which, through their performance on the site, both confront and stimulate daily routine and demand exploration and discovery. The users openly access the site from the north and use it for social gatherings, learning, prayer, communal kitchens, daily exercising, and activities related to rice production. The second encounter is a more deliberate act of commemoration. In this case, the visitor enters from the south and ambulates the site as one would a pagoda, progressing from past, through present, and future. A designed path leads the visitor through the site, forking and at times disorienting, but ultimately inciting exploration and discovery as the path highlights details and provides vantage points, slowly revealing the presence of the rice field and the relation to the city.

Conclusion The proposed scheme considers Tuol Sleng within the context of Cambodia’s past and present, using design as a tool to reveal a place of memory that reflects and confronts Khmer life. Positioned between remediation and anticipation, the scheme confronts ‘memory sickness’ and imposed absolute history, it creates a framework for the ‘bursting forth’ of memory within everyday life. The result is an architecture that does not dwell on or stand as evidence of past traumas; rather, it liberates a more meaningful consideration of memory activated by human experience. The project is expressed through a series of characters and narratives who convey the both the uses of the site and the variability of memory based on individuals, activities, time and place. Those elaborated are The Visitor, The Harvester, The Child, The Exerciser, The Sower, The Speaker, The Cook, The Prayer, The Contemplator, and The Celebrator.

សា រតី

/ smaardǝy /

1 N. spirit; attention; imagination; consciousness; reflex; will, presence of mind; memory, remembrance; mind, intellect, brains.

PART 2: to cultivate

The Characters

The Visitor

The Prayer

The Sower

The Speaker

The Contemplator

The Harvester

The Child

The Cook

The Exerciser

The Celebrator

The visitor

On a sweltering afternoon in mid-July, the visitor arrives at the entrance of Tuol Smartei, catching distorted glimpses of the site and her own reflection as her hired tuk-tuk pulls up. She enters the building, but what she finds is different from the blood stains and prison cells that she had been led to expect. Rather, she feels the comfort and cool relief of the shade, a sense of levity accompanied by a sense of unease. Progressing through the site, she follows the seemingly designed path directing her through one building to the next, disorienting her as pathways fork and she climbs a staircase and crosses a walkway, but eventually she ends up above the melee, reoriented by her new vantage point. From this point, the rest becomes clear. Below, the sun reflecting in the flooded plain, the rice field rustles rhythmically in the wind, the whisper of the bowing stalks is just audible over the din of the city. Beyond, the other structures rise, four buildings altogether, a mix of mottled concrete and airy framework, protecting and enclosing the field, enlivened by daily communal tasks of farming and cooking and exercising. A child splashes across the paddy. The automated and persistent voice of a food cart announces its wares. Two young boys in saffron robes canvass the street.

The Prayer

The melodic cacophony fades away as the Prayer withdraws from the city. From within, the void is immersive, only faint echoes of life permeate, a slight breeze, muffled voices, diffused sunlight, the drip drop of rain from a recent storm.

The Sower

The Sower was born in Kampong Cham Province. In the countryside he and his family were rice farmers. He is one of the newly urban peasantry that has recently migrated to Phnom Penh in search of higher wages. The Sower straightens his back, aching from the hunched posture necessary for uprooting the delicate green shoots he will soon transplant from the seedbed to the prepared rice field. Arching his back and using the back of his wrist to wipe the sweat from his brow, he considers the building before him. From the outside, all was as it once was, except for the openings. What was once an amalgam of wooden shutters, steel bars, and barbed wire has been replaced by horizontal stretches of spindly bamboo. The slender rods, like the scaffolding in the cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s constructions and demolitions, are both delicate and stabling.

The Speaker

Escaping the sudden rain, the students crowd into the room, rowdy from the outdoors, but in her presence they strive against their nature to be silent and respectful as they are expected to be. She stands restlessly at the front of the long deep room as they file up either side other the stepped auditorium, some clambering awkwardly up the center. Behind her, the rain falls in a dense curtain into the building, the water captured by the floating staircase above her head. To her left, beyond the plaster claustras, she sees the stream of water as it spouts out of the building, washing the faรงade clean as it runs. As the students settle, she goes over her speech in her head. As she has done countless times before, in countless other classrooms across the country, she will try to educate these children on something some have yet to understand and others have discovered far too young. The Speaker teaches children about the dangers of sexual exploitation and trafficking, instilling them what situations to avoid, and how to rely on each other and their community for support. The goal is to protect them and prevent future violence, nurturing educated and more aware citizens.

The Contemplator

The man descends the wide staircase and is submerged below ground where he tastes the damp and earthy air on his tongue, his nose recognizing a deep, sweet scent, reminiscent of the temples he has visited. As his vision adjusts to the sudden darkness, the first thing he notices is the burning circle of sunlight illuminating a patch of greenery below it. The man walks towards it, drawn by its foreignness, trailing his fingers along the cool smooth concrete wall as he advances. His hand encounters a small recess in the surface. He glances to his right at the anomaly he felt and observes that the walls are lined with these shallow cavities, some dark and empty, others dimly lit by slow-burning sticks of incense stemming from mounds of sand, small spirit houses, ktom neak ta, bearing offerings to the ancestors and land spirits, tended by visitors. He continues past these toward his original interest. From closer, the greenery he had noticed was in fact rice, like above, its hip-high stalks bowing with the weight of ripe strawcoloured grain. The field rises out of a hole in the concrete floor, shaped â&#x20AC;&#x201C; like the opening which lights it from above â&#x20AC;&#x201C; as a perfect circle. The man approaches the extremity of this ring and looks up toward the light and at the sky, the rain clouds closing in, framed by a halo of swaying stalks.

The Harvester

In 1975, the harvester was nine years old and a third grader at the Boeng Kak elementary school in the northern district of Phnom Penh. During the disorienting evacuation of the city, she was quickly separated from her parents and two sisters. She found herself digging irrigation canals in an assembly line of other young children in the countryside somewhere in the south. She remembers sitting down at dusk and counting the blisters on her palms and soles, but having to stop for she did know how to count any higher. Now she lives again in Phnom Penh, while she never did find her parents or sisters, she has a family of her own. On a morning in early December, she comes to check on the ripening of the rice plants. Rolling the grains between her fingers she feels the hard doughy texture and sees that they have begun to change from their sprightly green to a straw-tinted yellow. In a couple more days, when the majority of the grains have changed colour and the plants are stooped with the weight of ripened grains, she will return to complete the harvest, her own three daughters in tow.

The Child

100

The child was supposed to go straight home after school to help his mother run the shop, but even so he detours on his bicycle to Tuol Smartei where all his friends have gone. He drags one sandaled foot to slow down and his younger brother stumbles off the back where he has been balancing. The late afternoon sun leaves dappled shadows weaving across the paving, reflecting in the fresh puddles left by the rain. The shadows creep closer to the boys as, across the rice field, a girl shrieks gleefully. The young boy runs over to his brother, his bare feet smacking down on the saturated pavers, squeezes the older childâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hand and whispers urgently into his ear. The cry had caused the young boyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s dream to resurface. Last night, nestled between his mother and brother, the ghost of a girl, curiously resembling his own mother, had told him she wanted to be a bird, free to fly above the forest. The child leads his little brother by the hand down the wide stairway to the underground. He approaches the nun crouching in the corner as, with great care, her long sweeping fingers light three sticks of incense and hand them to him. With his brother, they place the glowing incense in one of the wall recesses and sit on the cool ground, folding their legs to one side, facing the strange round underground rice field, and pray together for the rebirth of the ghost.

101

102

103

The Cook

104

The red bricks containing the cooking fire are chipped and spalling in places. Bricks from another life. When she was eight years old, her mother taught her to make sweetly spiced traditional Khmer Curry. Circumstance has prevented her own motherhood. This warm and breezy November morning, the childless welcomes the motherless. As every Wednesday, she will share her family recipe with the neighbourhood girls, passing along the honoured practice of preparing food for loved ones. The warm aroma of curry will soon spill invitingly from the mottled concrete building.

105

106

107

The exerciser

108

The man jogs up to the northernmost corner of Tuol Smartei just as the sun begins to warm the ground. Many people are already there standing in groups and talking, the kids are buying bags of juice from the street vendor, the neighbourhood dogs sniffing around for scraps of breakfast. He takes the CD-player out of the storage room and drops his music into it. The opening pop beats of Ouk Sokun Kanhaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s newest song signal to the others that it is time to begin and they clamber up the grated metal steps onto the platforms bordered by patched concrete walls, each assuming their usual spot. The man â&#x20AC;&#x201C; standing on the lowest level within view of everyone, facing the three-storey high wall of the old stairwell â&#x20AC;&#x201C; begins a simple walk-in-place to warm up, his feet stomping on the chipping yellow and white tiles lining the floor. For the next ten songs, he steps and yells, projecting his voice above the sound of the music and the clamour of the waking neighbourhood. By the time they are finished, the heat has risen even under the dappled shade of the aerie structure and it time to begin the day in earnest. The man packs up his belongings as the others pass by, thanking him for leading their daily exercise routine.

109

110

111

The Celebrator

112

It is three oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;clock in the morning. Despite her exhaustion, she has endured until this, the final night of Pchum Ben. The past fifteen days have been a whirlwind of activity. On each day she has gathered with the older women of the community to prepare rice balls and rice cakes made from last seasonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Tuol Smartei harvest. As they cook, they share stories of lost loved ones, of the suffering ghosts they will commemorate. The Celebrator recalls her brother who was carted away after an imprisoned neighbor wrote down his name. Tonight, the energetic young people, both excited and unnerved by the hour and the raucous somberness, will throw these rice balls around the temple grounds, offering them as transitory bodies for the wandering ghosts, releasing them to their next life. Some mornings, the Celebrator awakens with thoughts of revenge against the Khmer Rouge who robbed her of her brother, the neighbor who named him. But she knows that revenge is not healthy for her mind or her community. She tries to make it stop. She straightens from her kneeling position, picking up a candle as she rises, and joins the amber glowing crowd in procession toward the pagoda.

113

114

115

116

117

APPENDIX A. Contesting Cambodia

CONTESTING CAMBoDIA The STruggLe for demoCraTiZaTioN iN PhNom PeNh’S PubLiC SPaCe

“They say we shall have to vote, that Cambodians should express themselves. But they know nothing. They will come and go, like the rain clouds. And we are like the frogs. If there is no noise, if everything is quiet, we may dare to raise our heads above the water. But at the first noise, we had better hide. Raised heads are easily cut off. We know that because we have seen it. All these people who have been, or dream of becoming our rulers again are ready to cut each others’ throats. There is room for only one water buffalo in the pond. And when big people fight amongst themselves, small people die. Violence is everywhere, lying in wait. Fear is everywhere too. It is not easy to be Cambodian.”1 - Serge Thion, 1993

“Our life is not easy,” she said. “We need to dare to protest.”2 -Mai Simorn, 34-year-old divorced mother, garment factory worker, 2013

120

121

Contesting Cambodia In the context of imposed control and ingrained debasement of democracy, public space takes on a much more valuable role than that of a simple space of leisure and recreation. Public space’s inherent ‘publicness’ can be traced to its ambiguity and contestability, and it is precisely through its continuous contestability that public space has the potential to act as a site of political participation. As such, these spaces can be examined through their locations within the urban context, their physical manifestations and articulations, and the rhetoric used to describe their use, both conceptual and actual. Space can be determined as public based on five types of spatial rights as defined by Carr et al: access, freedom of action, claim, change, ownership.3 Public space negotiates these spatial rights and acts as the medium through which political contestation is expressed. “An enlarged public space, along with vibrant civil society organizations, can serve to counter the exclusive nature of the state/ruling party control.”4 Recent electoral disputes in Cambodia have seen the public spaces of its capital, Phnom Penh, activated by human activity, conflict and power struggles. The development of Phnom Penh as an urban center is embedded with traces of its founding at the convergence of the Tonle Meekong, Tonle Bassac, and Tonle Sap rivers, the colonization of the French, the modernist boom of New Khmer Architecture, the ‘urbanicide’ of the Khmer Rouge, and the subsequent spatial and social recovery amid a struggle for democratization. These traces provide a necessary understanding of the role and control of public space, the aim to maintain civic order and the accountability of the citizenry. Throughout the urban development of Phnom Penh, authorities and governing bodies have employed dogmatic rhetoric to mediate the appropriate use of space to oppositional groups as well as the general inhabitants of the city. Lefebvre recognizes different definitions of space in which we can delineate first, representations of space as related to the production of order and regulated use of public space, and secondly, representational spaces as the social life and actual occurrences in public space.5 “This is an important distinction because it draws attention to the difference between the ‘official’ status of a space and the actual ability of various individuals and groups to use it.”6 Thus, the conceptualized space put forward by the government of Phnom Penh is not necessarily a representation of the space actualized through use. Nevertheless, this top-down conceptualization of space creates a strong imaginary for the intended ordered use of

122

Urban plan of Phnom Penh created by H. Hébard in 1925 >

the space and subsequently the desired organization of society as a whole. As such, this prescriptive rhetoric regarding public space is in fact the tool of mediation for urban development and social order in Phnom Penh.

ThaTCh viLLage To CoLoNiZaTioN Public space as presently recognized did not originally exist in Cambodia. The centers of cultural and social life in villages and cities alike were the pagodas.7 Given the consistently predominant Buddhist population in Cambodia, pagodas have strong cultural and spatial identities. Used for religious activities, formal and informal meetings, schools, shelters, leisure, and day-to-day life of nearby residents, pagodas represented vital public spaces in Cambodia. While they are still highly important in rural regions, in larger cities through processes of colonization, subversion, and the struggle for democratization, pagodas were eventually replaced by more conventional models of public space. Both the colonial and post-colonial urban development of Phnom Penh made of the city an urban lab for the rational ideals of modernism.8 In the mid-19th

century,

Phnom

Penh was little more than a village of thatch and bamboo on the banks of the Tonle Sap.9 Upon arrival in 1860, the French did not perceive Phnom Penh as an adequate capital city for the Kingdom of Cambodia.10 Under the influence of French colonization,

the

urban

form of Phnom Penh was reshaped through two main endeavours in planning. In an effort to modernize and bring order to the city, â&#x20AC;&#x153;French administrators

sought

123

legislate new patterns of space in response to what they perceived to be the disorder of the capital and its social structure.”11 A first replanning was executed by Daniel Fabre in the 1890s while the second was realised by Ernest Hébrard, Director of Architecture and Urbanism in French Indochina, in 1925.12 Hébrard favoured a “scholarly academic design based on an assertive road network, the ‘alignment’ of buildings in relation to roads, tree planting and a well-defined hierarchy of urban space.”13 The city developed a homogeneous, Haussmann-like quality – apparent in its geometric grid intersected by grand boulevards – that is still legible in the city fabric today.

Public space in colonial phnom penh In typical colonial fashion of fighting the elements, in an effort to protect against frequent floods in Phnom Penh, the French rejected the traditional Cambodian system of stilts and openness that allowed free circulation of the water and interaction with the river and waterways. Rather, they relied on physical barriers between the water and the city, filling wetlands, waterways and lakes and creating a “system of protective dykes, and a network of roads, drains and water supplies.”14 As a result, they enforced their colonial power through a system of hard boundaries created by planning, mapping, land registry, and unifying tree lined streets, effectively delimitating public and private spaces.15 Between 1920 and 1940, urban planning in the city was highly influenced by the role of public space in beautifying and structuring the city. Hébrard introduced public spaces in an endeavor to air out and organize the city, proposing different types of public space raging from parks and gardens, squares and plazas, to tree-lined avenues and boulevards.

new khmer architecture Following the end of French rule in 1953, Cambodia celebrated its independence by expanding infrastructure and architecture as symbols of progress and National pride, marking a radical break from the colonial past.16 French educated Cambodian architect Vann Molyvann, head of town planning and housing at the Ministry of Public Works, oversaw this architectural golden age of what became known as New Khmer Architecture, an amalgam of ancient Khmer, vernacular and modern architecture.17 However, the traditional spontaneous development of Khmer villages did not provide a model for urban planning. This period saw the urban development of Phnom Penh dedicate large sites to public buildings as well as repeat bad interpretations of Hébrard’s legacy.18 Major constructions at the time include Phnom Penh University, a rationally organized, open, moated site, and

124

The construction of ministry buildings along Russian Boulevard in the 1960s > Post-colonial development of Phnom Penh, black area shows urbanized space >

the many government institutions lining the new broad Russian Boulevard. Between 1953 and 1970, the population of Phnom Penh exploded from an initial 370,000 to one million.19 As a result, many of the notable developments in the city in this period were related to adequate housing and infrastructure. It can be said that, public spaces of both the colonial and postcolonial city are constructions of the ruling elite. Certainly, elites and incumbent regimes attempt to enforce their representations of space. However, this ignores the element of contestation, and the prospect of spaces of representation to emerge.20 Nevertheless, the legacy of colonialism involved the desire to control the chaotic disorder of the traditional settlement and implement a specific way of life and method of urban occupation. Furthermore, post-colonial Phnom Penh was celebrated for its coherence and beauty which was based largely on the aestheticization of space and politics.21 It could be claimed that this aestheticization led to an alienating urban condition that drove a rebellion.22

125

the fall of phnom penh When Lon Nol staged a US-backed military coup in 1970, effectively overthrowing King Sihanouk, Cambodia’s creative era came to an abrupt end. Subsequently, the Viet Minh and the Communist Party of Kampuchea (dubbed the Khmer Rouge by Sihanouk) continued to gain control over much of the country, provoking five years of bloody civil war.23 Internally displaced refugees flooded into Phnom Penh in an effort to escape the US-bombing campaign that had crossed over from Vietnam. The character of Phnom Penh’s inhabitants changed drastically from the middle class majority of Sihanouk’s reign to an overpopulation of newly urban peasantry. Bringing an end to the civil war, on April 17th, 1975, the victorious Khmer Rouge rolled their tanks into Phnom Penh, ushering in a new era of terror, madness, and mayhem on an inconceivable scale. The Khmer Rouge set out to create a paradigmatic Maoist and Marxist-Leninist agrarian society which would commence with the complete obliteration of the past.24 Any form of urban development was brutally halted as, within 48 hours of taking Phnom Penh, the Khmer Rouge forcibly emptied towns and cities, marching their inhabitants to the countryside, leaving behind all memory of their past life, where they farmed the land as slave labourers. Phnom Penh became a ghost town, reduced from a city of perhaps two million25 occupants to only a few Khmer Rouge officials. Over less than four years between 1.2 and 2 million26 people, roughly twenty percent of the population, died by execution or from starvation, overwork, and mistreated disease.

126

City-dwellers are evacuated down Monivong Boulevard ˄ Central Market in an empty Phnom Penh during Democratic Kampuchea >

imaginaries of absence The Khmer Rouge proclaimed their authority by denying urbanism and claiming the space of the city. In this de-urbanized Phnom Penh, schools were perverted as prisons, the trees lining the vast boulevards were substituted with productive trees growing banana and coconut,27 and public spaces were used as mass-grave sites, planted with fruits and vegetables, or grazed by animals brought in to sustain the remaining inhabitants.28 The Khmer Rouge ... used their occupation of Phnom Penh’s public space as an iconographic representation of the ultimate victory of their revolution, but seemingly tantamount to absolute mastery in the ‘art of control,’ they suppressed the potential for adversarial counterinsurgency by expelling the city’s entire urban population to the countryside, thus eliminating the forum of urban public space altogether.29 In addition to five years of civil war ravaging the country, the four years of vacancy and neglect that followed were enough to disfigure the city in a permanent way, destroying physical structure and infrastructure as well as urban society and way of life. Imaginaries of absence were embedded in the city as public space. As such, the Khmer Rouge period left an equal legacy on Phnom Penh, if not greater than the building boom that preceded it.

127

Furthermore, the violence of the Khmer Rouge wherein ‘Khmer killed Khmer’ left a legacy of fear in its wake. The widespread representations of these gruesome events are centered on communicating ‘authenticity’ and instilling a fear of recurrence.

‘liberation’ On January 7th, 1979, three years, eight months and twenty-nine days after it began, the rule of the Khmer Rouge was brought to an end as armed Vietnamese forces, accompanied by their Cambodian allies, “liberated” Phnom Penh finding it largely abandoned. The city once again became a melting-pot of inhabitants as the displaced from around the country emerged to re-occupy it. The government that was instituted at this time is, to a certain degree, the same that can be found in power today. Despite changes in regime designation, current Prime Minister Hun Sen has occupied his seat since 1985. In the decade that followed the ‘liberation’, due to US disapproval of the Vietnameseinstalled government in Phnom Penh, Cambodia was denied UN development aid and banned from international trade agreements. As a result, after ten years of warfare and genocide, Cambodia was completely forsaken in poverty and continued unrest. In 1991, the UN finally interceded and negotiated a settlement between Cambodian resistance groups and the then named State of Cambodia. The signing of the Paris Peace Agreements marked the beginning of “Cambodia’s ‘triple transition’ from authoritarianism to democracy, command economy to free market, and war to peace,”30 overseen by the newly established United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC). UNTAC’s goal was to foster a political environment in which “free and fair” elections could take place, leading to a new constitution, at last supporting the country’s rehabilitation. The State of Cambodia renamed itself the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) and, befitting the Paris Peace Agreement, made promises of freedom of political beliefs and freedom of assembly.31 However, “it was not long before authorities violated the ‘democratic’ spirit of these agreements.”32 Phnom Penh protests regarding government corruption escalated over the course of a few days until authorities became aggressive, eventually dispersing the demonstrations and leaving 8 civilians dead and 26 injured. The government persisted, passing a legislation severely restricting permission for demonstrations. This reaction attempts to impose order to public space and denies contestation and appropriation as spaces of representation. Furthermore, the legislation set a precedent for “delegitimizing

128

of demonstrations through law.”33

democracy square In 1993, the election promised by UNTAC was held; however, its position as “free and fair” was unambiguously lost. “Cambodian voters were informed, via propaganda, intimidation, and violence that democracy was not available, that there was no space to define and manifest one’s individual identity, nor was there space to foster meaningful social relations without fear of being questioned on their loyalty.”34 Nonetheless, a large majority of Cambodians were persuaded to go vote, proving the desire for democracy and proper representation. The royalist FUNCINPEC party won the election and formed a coalition government with the presiding CPP. However, “while Prince Ranariddh and Hun Sen became co-prime ministers, the CPP never truly shared power and dominated the new regime.”35 Following the election, the Monarchy was reinstated in a figurehead position and the Constitution of the Kingdom of Cambodia was drafted. Article 37 of the constitution, as it remains to this day, proclaims that “the rights to strike and to organize peaceful demonstrations shall be exercised within the framework of law.”36 Article 41 elaborates that “Khmer citizens shall have freedom of expression, press, publication and assembly.”37 In 1997, Hun Sen’s CPP staged a bloody coup to replace Prince Ranariddh and regain complete control. Following this, the “intimidation of oppositional elements and the crackdown on both the public sphere and public space”38 continued. When a peaceful demonstration by Sam Rainsy’s political party opposing CPP subordination, held in the square outside the National Assembly, was viciously attacked with grenades, it was a reminder that despite the constitutional recognition of the right to non-violent demonstration, open dissent would not be tolerated in public space. The square became ideologically important in the Cambodian struggle for democracy during this period and was subsequently named “Democracy Square.” The square was ideally located amid the Royal Palace, National Assembly, Wat Botumvatey, the CambodiaVietnam friendship monument, the Hun Sen gardens and the independence monument. “A broad lawn in the middle of these [sites], which represent different branches of power in Cambodian state and society, Democracy Square represent[ed] an important symbolic space.”39

129

The 1998 elections in Cambodia beheld the CPP exercising divisive mechanisms of surveillance and fear, yet the post-election period saw solidarity amongst the people and the plodding development of democracy. “[…] people from all over Cambodia converged in Phnom Penh following the announcement of the election results, taking to the capital’s streets en masse. Cambodians began gathering by the thousands in Democracy Square on 24 August 1998, to protest against the results of the election.”40

public spectacle of solidarity “Democracy Square became a liberatory space in which those normally subjected to the panoptic surveillance of the village could situate their embodiment by actively taking the spaces of the capital for public unmediated use.”41 After two weeks of occupation of Democracy Square, the demonstrations became violent as riot police moved in, depriving the use of public space. Hun Sen quickly moved to forbid monks from taking part in protests, and then banned demonstrations all together. Yet the people defied the ban, and the following day about 8,000 people again took to the streets to participate in a march led by a large group of monks. […] Thus the totalitarian armour of Cambodia’s “deprivers” of public space was starting to crack as their control over the public domain had become too intense. This dominance resulted not in the continued submissiveness of the population, but from the perspective of those in power, the undesired effect of violent outbursts “from below” against the oppression of an exploitative social order. The government crackdown continued and eventually the protests subsided, although the political deadlock persisted.42 Finally, in November 1998, Prince Ranariddh conceded and, neglecting Sam Rainsy’s party, formed a new coalition with Hun Sen. Nevertheless, the Democracy Square movement had the positive implication of the potential threat from demonstrators, forcing the government to realize that it would no longer be able to practice such an explicit approach to spatial control. Cambodians have clearly learned a number of valuable lessons from this movement. Most importantly, the public spectacle of this massive showing of solidarity allowed Cambodians to take the space necessary to rediscover themselves as both individuals and as an empowered collective.43 In time, as protests in Democracy square became increasingly attacked, demonstrators began shifting the location of their resistance to other site around the city. National

130

Post-election protests in Democracy Square, 1998 > Democracy Square, 1998 >

131

elections were held once again in 2003 and in 2008 and recognized as relatively less violent than previous ones, despite several political killings prior to both.

law on peaceful assembly In 2009, the National Assembly fulfilled the government’s ambition to strip Cambodians of their constitutional right to strike and non-violent demonstration44 through the approval of the Law on Peaceful Assembly. The law aims to provide order and organization to public space by imposing strict limitations to its use and appropriation. It acts under the pretence of concern for ‘public order’ and ‘national security’;45 however, in reality it strictly defines the limits of ‘peaceful demonstration’46 and establishes a set of mandatory procedures for informing the authorities prior to assembly.47 Moreover, it defines two different types of sites for demonstrations, each with its own requirements. As such, an assembly in the public domain would require that notification be given to authorities five days in advance, providing identifying information of three leaders. However, demonstrations to be held on private- or collectively-owned property or at a ‘Freedom Park’, established in each capital and province across the country for this specific use, have the same process but need only give twelve hours of notice and yet are limited to gatherings of 200 people and between the hours of 6 a.m. and 6 p.m.48 The concern for such ‘Freedom Parks’ is that they may in fact be remotely located, away from other important democratic institution, reducing the impact of the message delivered by the demonstration.49 This law has established a system that is so burdensome and inhibiting that in point of fact, demonstrations must necessarily be approved by authorities whose justifications for refusal of ‘public order’ and ‘national security’ are too vague to allow objective judgement. It provides legal defence for authorities to “take proper measures to prevent or stop the demonstration immediately”50 if it should “turn violent.” Thus, this new law permits demonstration by declaration only, creating a misapprehension of a democratic procedure that in principle is not at all thus.

freedom park Phnom Penh’s Freedom Park was inaugurated in Daun Penh district, near Wat Phnom, in November of 2010. Municipal government rhetoric surrounding the park applauds it as a symbol of democratic progress: “During the Pol Pot regime, we could not protest and Phnom Penh turned into a ghost city, but now we have a Freedom Park.”51 However, the park, unlike Democratic Square that preceded it, is located away from customary sites of demonstration such as major government buildings and Hun Sen’s home. Rather, its

132

Inauguration of Freedom Park, 2010 >

expansive 12,000 square meter undefined space is separated from sites of decisionmaking power. Phnom Penh Municipal Police Chief Touch Naruth has warned that street protests would no longer be allowed due to traffic interruptions52 and should protesters go to another site, “we will not take violent measures against [them] […]. We will educate them and bring the back to Freedom Park.”53 This illustrates the desire of the authorities to maintain a strict control over demonstrations. Ou Virak, president of the Cambodian Center for Human rights, reminds that “if freedom is being regulated, then it is not freedom at all.”54 Many have echoed these concerns regarding the ‘freedom’ of Freedom Park. Yim Sovann, a member of parliament from Sam Rainsy’s party, notes that the square is unsuited to Cambodian climate and is too small to accommodate a large crowd, “we will not stand under the hot sun in such a small place. We will ask for a permit to march through the streets if necessary.”55 Nevertheless, the strict limitations on demonstrations everywhere have led the majority of those staged in the past few years to take place in ‘Freedom Park.’

133

the return of sam rainsy The most recent election and source of controversy in Cambodia occurred in July 2013. This election was no exception to the voter intimidation that has been prevalent during previous election periods in Cambodia. While campaigning in May, “the Prime Minister [Hun Sen] [warned] voters […] of what may happen if the C.P.P. loses power: New infrastructure projects will end; the schools and pagodas bearing Hun Sen’s name will be destroyed; civil war may break out.”56 Having spent the summer of 2013 living in an outlying district of Phnom Penh, I am no stranger to the campaign rallies that filled the streets of Cambodia during the month of July. Though predominated by boisterous CPP karaoke trucks and crowds, there were also a number of demonstrations led by the opposition parties, the Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) and FUNCINPEC. Across the country, representation of space made allegiances clear, every public building and many private homes flying the banner of their supported party. Sam Rainsy, who had lived in self-imposed exile for four years, returned with the pardon of King Norodom Sihamoni to run in the election. Rainsy returned to Cambodia in July, mere days before the election, to lead the CNRP, the CPP’s main opposition. He received a hero’s welcome upon his arrival at Phnom Penh airport, greeted by an enormous crowd people who lined Russian Boulevard leading back into the city where they culminated their gathering at ‘Freedom Park.’ Meanwhile, authorities had made further spatial commentary through the treatment of ‘Freedom Park. ’ Prior to Rainsy’s arrival, maintenance of the park had been neglected by the municipality and their engaged garbage collection company, leaving the site covered in the trash that had accumulated over the campaign season.57 Rainsy’s heroic arrival and motivational speech nearly took place among piles of garbage. Nevertheless, Rainsy’s physical presence in Cambodia brought renewed energy to the CNRP campaign and demonstrations gained momentum.

134

CPP demonstration, July 2013 || Sam Rainsy welcomed along Russian Boulevard, July 2013 > Sam Rainsy delivers speech at Freedom Park >

135

CONTESTED ELECTIONS In recurrent fashion, the results of the Cambodian National Election were highly contested. In consequence, campaigning demonstrations quickly morphed into electoral protests, driven by the milestone significant seat gain of the CNRP. Since the announcement of the results in August, the CNRP has led a stream of demonstrations, with a focus on peaceful protest demanding the investigation of reported voting irregularities.

136

Voting disparities relative to incidence of poverty during the July 2013 election Ë&#x201E; Ready for the night in Freedom Park, September 2013 || Food vendor and tent in Freedom Park, September 2013 >

maturing of the cambodian electorate The demonstrations have mostly all centered on ‘Freedom Park,’ despite spatial and social controls, the protesters have found certain ways to appropriate the space. Through temporary shelters, stage platforms, and sit-ins, the space has been physically claimed as a democratic space. The sheer presence of people has even served to improve the economy of the area with many local vendors setting up shop on the square and seeing an increase in sales.58 Moreover, thanks to their insistence on peacefulness, the demonstrators hold the upper hand in the perceptual power struggle. “[Security forces] will look bad when they come with their guns and water cannons to crack down on us,” Sam Rainsy said in an interview. “We will offer them flowers.”59 The CPP is portraying these protests as attempts to instigate violence and riots; in response it has deployed military units to Phnom Penh and its outskirts. The Council of Ministers spokesman Phay Siphan maintained that the intention is for ‘public order’ and ‘national safety’, calling this “a preventative measure … so the military police can be prepared to crack down quickly if a demonstration turns into rioting, and to protect ordinary public activity.”60 Despite these fear tactics, Kem Lay, a researcher who has conducted surveys and studied social trends for government ministries as well as for the United States Agency for International Development, notes that a positive outcome of the disputation of the election results is “the maturing of the Cambodian electorate.”61 People have become keener to speak their minds and be critical of government policies.

137

138

CNRP supporters march along Moningvon Boulevard, September 2013 Ë&#x201E; People try to deliver a petition to postpone the first parliamentary session, September 2013 Ë&#x201E; Street march routes and political sites in the vicinity of demonstration points >

to the streets In an effort to reach their preferred audience, the majority of the demonstrations have at some point left ‘Freedom Park’ and taken to the streets. These marches have led to prominent government buildings, toured the international embassies delivering petitions, and paraded along the waterfront at Sisowath Quay where traffic disruption allowed them to be noticed. However, authorities continued to constrict the physical space of the protesters, erecting barricades of barbed wire and roadblocks to keep them away from the Royal Palace.62 While violence has broken out at these events, the majority have proved to remain calm. The physical boundaries of ‘Freedom Park’ in conjunction with top-down control of the actions that took place there proved too limiting on the freedom of democratic expression. The street, at the very least, provided a space of representation and visibility for demonstrations.

139

muLTi-PurPoSe STreeT Jane Jacobs remarked that “streets and sidewalks, the main public places of the city, are its most vital organs.”63 In Cambodia, and particularly in Phnom Penh, throughout the multi-handed development of the city, the streets have remained the strongest portrayal of public space.64 The street in Phnom Penh, a city attributing the shop-house typology, serves the compound purposes of transportation, economic activity, and leisure simultaneously. Spaces that were characterized by imaginaries of absence during both colonialism and the Khmer Rouge have adapted into bustling public realms. The ordered chaos of traffic flows in all directions, wares spill out of shop fronts, street vendors crowd the curbsides, and teas, fish, and rice are spread to dry on the sidewalk. The street

140

‘Pavement economy’ in Phnom Penh ˄ Multi-use public space of Phnom Penh street ˄ Thousands of Cambodian’s take to the streets in Phnom Penh against Hun Sen in 1998 >

provides a necessary space of visibility, mobility, and social interaction. While elsewhere in the city, the lines between private and public space are growing more defined, the street has remained in an opportune grey area between the two, dissolving boundaries and lending transparency to the organization of city space.

CONCLUSION An immersive understanding of public space in Phnom Penh relies on a historical knowledge of the urban development of the city and the nature of the power struggles which occurred therein. Cambodia’s ragged political and social history has left both a material and immaterial legacy in Phnom Penh. “Spatial meanings are actively manipulated by the city and the state to represent diverse political and economic agendas. Over time these agendas become embedded in the architecture and landscape design of public space, providing an arena for civic contestation and public involvement.”65 The public space of the city has evolved from the traditional Cambodian pagoda, through colonial rule, post-colonial redefinition, the emptied cities of the Khmer Rouge, and the progression from silence to loquaciousness in the past three decades. The public character of spaces has been considered from the perspective of their prescriptive narratives, their use in reality, the connotation of their locations, and the way in which they are materialized. The inherently contested nature of space in Phnom Penh is illustrative of its ‘publicness’. The space is contested both in physical presence and in metaphysical representation.

141

Endnotes and Bibliographies

Endnotes Pages 8-57:

For further discussion regarding the adaptation of the name, see Barbara Stehle, “Anterior Spaces at S.21,” in Difficult Memories: Reconciling Meaning, ed. Markus Berger and Liliane Wong, Interventions/Adaptive Reuse (Providence, RI: Department of Interior Architecture, Rhode Island School of Design, 2013). 2 Khamboly Dy, A History of Democratic Kampuchea (1975-1979)(Phnom Penh, Cambodia: Documentation Center of Cambodia, 2007), 48. 3 Norodom Sihanouk, “Le Développement de L’instruction Publique (Education Nationale), la Jeunesse et L’essor Extraordinaire des Sports sous le Sangkum Reastr Niyum,” Photo-Souvenirs du Cambodge Sangkum Reastr Niyum 1955-69, no. 3 (1994): 2. Cited in Stehle, “Anterior Spaces at S.21.” Also, for a detailed account of the educational system during this period, see David M. Ayres, Anatomy of a Crisis : Education, Development, and the State in Cambodia, 1953-1998(Honolulu: University of Hawaii press, 2002). 4 Helen Grant Ross and Darryl Collins, Building Cambodia : New Khmer Architecture, 1953-1970(Bangkok: Key Pub., 2006). 5 Ibid. 6 Sihanouk, “Le Développement de L’instruction Publique (Education Nationale), la Jeunesse et L’essor Extraordinaire des Sports sous le Sangkum Reastr Niyum.” 7 The original plans of the Lycée no longer exist. Plans and elevations of buildings A,B,C,D were provided by Cambodian architects Pen Sereypagna and Vuth Danith who surveyed the site. The plan of building E and composed drawing of the compound was assembled by the author with the aid of photos and written accounts. 8 Ross and Collins, Building Cambodia : New Khmer Architecture, 1953-1970, 206. 9 Sihanouk, “Le Développement de L’instruction Publique (Education Nationale), la Jeunesse et L’essor Extraordinaire des Sports sous le Sangkum Reastr Niyum,” 2. 10 Ross and Collins, Building Cambodia : New Khmer Architecture, 1953-1970. 11 Stehle, “Anterior Spaces at S.21,” 50. 12 Dy, A History of Democratic Kampuchea (1975-1979), 10. 13 Ibid., 2. 14 Ibid., 14. 15 Alex Hinton, “Truth, Representation and the Politics of Memory after Genocide,” in People of Virtue : Reconfiguring Religion, Power and Morality in Cambodia Today, ed. Alexandra Kent and David P. Chandler(Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2008), 62. 16 Dy, A History of Democratic Kampuchea (1975-1979), 69. Estimates of the number of people who died during Democratic Kampuchea vary. Ledgerwood (1997) contends that these numbers place the various estimators in the contested fields of national memory. 17 Pin Yathay and John Man, Stay Alive, My Son(New York: Free Press, 1987), 63. Cited in Hinton, “Truth, Representation and the Politics of Memory after Genocide,” 78. 18 Translated from the French by author. Sihanouk, “Le Développement de L’instruction Publique (Education Nationale), la Jeunesse et L’essor Extraordinaire des Sports sous le Sangkum Reastr Niyum,” 1. 19 Dy, A History of Democratic Kampuchea (1975-1979), 48. 20 David P. Chandler, Voices from S-21 : Terror and History in Pol Pot’s Secret Prison(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 21 Chum Mei, interview by Sim Sorya, March 23, 2006. 22 Chandler, Voices from S-21 : Terror and History in Pol Pot’s Secret Prison, 147. 23 Chum Mei discusses what he heard in his time at S-21: “I heard the sound of crying people. “Oh, Mother please helps me. I am dying. Oh, Father please helps me.” They also insulted the interrogator, “You Motherfucker! You can kill me right away. Don’t torture me!” “I am willing to die.”” Mei, “Interview with Survivor of Tuol Sleng Prison.” 24 When asked if he ever heard the guards talking to each other, Norng answered: “They occasionally chatted with each other. I dared not to stay near them since I was still fearful.” Norng Chanphal, interview by Vanthan Peou Dara and Chy Terith, February 13, 2009. 25 Stehle, “Anterior Spaces at S.21,” 53. 1

144

Ibid., 54. Judy Ledgerwood, “The Cambodian Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crimes: National Narrative,” Museum Anthropology 21, no. 1 (1997): 85. 28 Stehle, “Anterior Spaces at S.21,” 55. 29 Chandler, Voices from S-21 : Terror and History in Pol Pot’s Secret Prison, 4. 30 The museum was named ‘Tuol Sleng’ (Hillock of the Sleng tree, or poisonous tree) after the primary school that once stood behind it. 31 In a 1995 interview with Mai Lam cited in Ledgerwood, “The Cambodian Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crimes: National Narrative,” 89., Mai Lam envisioned his duty as providing proof of DK crimes because “the Cambodian people who suffered the war could not understand the war – and the new generation also cannot understand.” 32 Serge Thion, Watching Cambodia : Ten Paths to Enter the Cambodian Tangle(Bangkok: White Lotus, 1993). 33 Ledgerwood, “The Cambodian Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crimes: National Narrative,” 89. Presently, the museum is frequently more by ethnic Khmer than by foreigners, yet this does not change the original intention of the endeavor. 34 “The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum: Unesco Memory of the World Program and the Reorganization of the Museum,” UNESCO Culture Sector, http://www.unesco.org/new/en/culture/themes/dynamiccontent-single-view/news/the_tuol_sleng_genocide_museum_unesco_memory_of_the_world_ program_and_the_reorganization_of_the_museum/#.UqdfuMRDuSp. 35 For a discussion confronting the western model of museums in different cultures, see Christina F. Kreps, Liberating Culture : Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Museums, Curation, and Heritage Preservation(London: Routledge, 2003). 36 Stehle, “Anterior Spaces at S.21,” 57. 37 Ibid. 38 James A. Craig and Matt Ozga-Lawn, Resilience, Pamphlet Architecture 32 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2012). 39 Ashley Thompson, “Buddhism in Cambodia : Rupture and Continuity,” in Buddhism in World Cultures : Comparative Perspectives, ed. Stephen C. Berkwitz(Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2006), 139pp. 40 Ibid., 158. 41 For discussions on ‘ritualcide’ during DK and its traumatic effect on Khmer society, see Peg LeVine, Love and Dread in Cambodia : Weddings, Births, and Ritual Harm under the Khmer Rouge(Singapore: NUS Press, 2010). 42 For discussions on heritage preservation in a Buddhist context, see Anna Karlström, “Spiritual Materiality: Heritage Preservation in a Buddhist World?,” Journal of Social Archaeology 5, no. 3 (2005). And Maurizio Peleggi, “The Unbearable Impermanence of Things: Reflections on Buddhism, Cultural Memory and Heritage Conservation,” in Routledge Handbook of Heritage in Asia, ed. Patrick T. Daly and Tim Winter(Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2012). 43 For a discussion on the very particular post-revolution post-traumatic stress disorder suffered by Khmer, see Sotheara Chhim, “Baksbat (Broken Courage): A Trauma-Based Cultural Syndrome in Cambodia,” Medical anthropology: Cross Cultural Studies in Health and Illness 32, no. 2 (2013). 44 All discussion of pchum ben is thanks to research conducted by Judy Ledgerwood, Anne Yvonne Guillou and Peg LeVine. 45 Judy Ledgerwood, “Buddhist Ritual and the Reordering of Social Relations in Cambodia,” South East Asia Research 20, no. 2 (2012): 196. 46 Ibid., 194. 47 Ibid., 196. 48 A. Y. Guillou, “An Alternative Memory of the Khmer Rouge Genocide: The Dead of the Mass Graves and the Land Guardian Spirits,” ibid.: 218. 49 Ibid. 50 This is in certain ways an attempt to propose alternative narratives to a negative collective memory. Rithy Panh’s latest documentary identifies the lack of representation of certain memories of Democratic Kampuchea, L’image manquante, and tries to recreate them through the eyes of a child (Panh himself). Rithy Panh, “L’image Manquante,”(Cambodia; France2013). 26 27

145

Endnotes Pages 1116-137 (Contesting Cambodia):

Serge Thion, Watching Cambodia : Ten Paths to Enter the Cambodian Tangle(Bangkok: White Lotus, 1993). 2 Thomas Fuller, “In an Unsettled Cambodia, Preparing to Confront the Government,” The New York Times, September 5 2013. 3 Stephen Carr et al., Public Space(Cambridge, England; New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press, 1992). As cited in Setha M. Low, On the Plaza : The Politics of Public Space and Culture(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000). 4 Kheang Un and Sokbunthoeun So, “Politics of Natural Resource Use in Cambodia,” Asian Affairs: An American Review 36, no. 3 (2009): 127. 5 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space(Oxford, OX, UK; Cambridge, Mass., USA: Blackwell, 1991), 33. 6 Simon Springer, Cambodia’s Neoliberal Order : Violence, Authoritarianism, and the Contestation of Public Space(London; New York: Routledge, 2010). 7 Chhay Rithisen, “Livre Blanc du Développement et de L’aménagement de Phnom Penh,” ed. Bureau des Affaires urbaines(Phnom Penh, Cambodia: Municipalité de Phnom Penh; Ambassade de France au Cambodge, 2007), 116. 8 Sylvia Nam, “Phnom Penh: From the Politics of Ruin to the Possibilities of Return,” Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review 23, no. 1 (2011). 9 Helen Grant Ross and Darryl Collins, Building Cambodia : New Khmer Architecture, 1953-1970(Bangkok: Key Pub., 2006). 10 Michel Igout and Serge Dubuisson, Phnom Penh Then and Now(Bangkok: White Lotus, 1993), 6. Cited in Nam, “Phnom Penh: From the Politics of Ruin to the Possibilities of Return.” 11 “Phnom Penh: From the Politics of Ruin to the Possibilities of Return,” 57. 12 Rithisen, “Livre Blanc du Développement et de L’aménagement de Phnom Penh,” 101. 13 Ross and Collins, Building Cambodia : New Khmer Architecture, 1953-1970. 14 Ibid. 15 Rithisen, “Livre Blanc du Développement et de L’aménagement de Phnom Penh,” 100. 16 Ross and Collins, Building Cambodia : New Khmer Architecture, 1953-1970. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Springer, Cambodia’s Neoliberal Order : Violence, Authoritarianism, and the Contestation of Public Space, 44. 21 Nam, “Phnom Penh: From the Politics of Ruin to the Possibilities of Return,” 62. On the subject of “aestheticization of politics,” see also, David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity : An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change(Oxford [England]; Cambridge, Mass., USA: Blackwell, 1990). As well as Walter Benjamin and J. A. Underwood, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction(London: Penguin, 2008). 22 Nam, “Phnom Penh: From the Politics of Ruin to the Possibilities of Return,” 62. 23 Khamboly Dy, A History of Democratic Kampuchea (1975-1979)(Phnom Penh, Cambodia: Documentation Center of Cambodia, 2007), 10. 24 Ibid., 2. 25 Ibid., 14. 26 Ibid., 69. Estimates of the number of people who died during Democratic Kampuchea vary. Ledgerwood (1997) contends that these numbers place the various estimators in the contested fields of national memory. 27 Rithisen, “Livre Blanc du Développement et de L’aménagement de Phnom Penh,” 106. 28 Barbara Stehle, “Anterior Spaces at S.21,” in Difficult Memories: Reconciling Meaning, ed. Markus Berger and Liliane Wong, Interventions/Adaptive Reuse (Providence, RI: Department of Interior Architecture, Rhode Island School of Design, 2013), 53. 29 Springer, Cambodia’s Neoliberal Order : Violence, Authoritarianism, and the Contestation of Public Space, 59. 30 Ibid., 62. 1

146

Frederick Z. Brown, “Cambodia in 1991: An Uncertain Peace,” Asian Survey Asian Survey 32, no. 1 (1992): 93. Cited in Springer, Cambodia’s Neoliberal Order : Violence, Authoritarianism, and the Contestation of Public Space, 63. 32 Cambodia’s Neoliberal Order : Violence, Authoritarianism, and the Contestation of Public Space, 63. 33 Ibid., 64. 34 Ibid., 71. 35 Ibid., 73. 36 “The Constitution of the Kingdom of Cambodia,” (Constitutional Council, 2010). 37 Ibid. 38 Cambodia’s Neoliberal Order : Violence, Authoritarianism, and the Contestation of Public Space, 81. 39 Caroline Hughes, The Political Economy of Cambodia’s Transition, 1991-2001(London; New York: Routledge Curzon, 2003), 197. Cited in Springer, Cambodia’s Neoliberal Order : Violence, Authoritarianism, and the Contestation of Public Space. 40 Cambodia’s Neoliberal Order : Violence, Authoritarianism, and the Contestation of Public Space, 100. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid., 101. 43 Ibid., 109. 44 Article 37, “The Constitution of the Kingdom of Cambodia.” 45 Article 2, “Royal Kram: No. Norsor/Rorkormor/1209/025 Law on Peaceful Assembly,” (Phnom Penh2009). 46 Article 4: “The peaceful assembly refers to a gathering or a march conducted by a group of people to publicly demand, protest or express their sentiments, opinions or will by using various forms or means peacefully.” Article 3 states that the law does not apply to rallies related to labour disputes or elections. Ibid. 47 Articles 5-14, ibid. 48 Article 14, ibid. 49 Article 28 states only that the park must be a compound “which the general public can easily hear and see.” Ibid. 50 Article 20, ibid. 51 Phnom Penh Governor Kep Chuktema, quoted in: Vong Sokheng, “‘Freedom Park’ Inaugurated,” The Phnom Penh Post, November 4 2010. 52 Suy Se, “Cambodia’s ‘Freedom Park’ Worries Rights Groups,” Agence France-Presse(2010), http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jD9X8YHSoBSosXQf7gRv1j3jH2Mw?docI d=CNG.164caa25dc9f9cd73359c4be468ff1ec.5f1. 53 Quoted in Sokheng, “‘Freedom Park’ Inaugurated.” 54 Quoted in ibid. 55 Quoted in Se, “Cambodia’s ‘Freedom Park’ Worries Rights Groups”. 56 Julia Wallace, “The Fresh Princes of Phnom Penh,” International New York Times, May 3 2013. 57 Matt Blomberg and Ben Sokhean, “Garbage Mounts at Freedom Park Ahead of Rainsy’s Return,” The Cambodia Daily, July 17 2013. 58 Hor Kimsay and Renzenbrink, “A Protest Economy Emerges,” The Phnom Penh Post, September 13 2013. 59 Quoted in: Fuller, “In an Unsettled Cambodia, Preparing to Confront the Government.” 60 Quoted in: May Titthara and Daniel Quinlan, “Military Ready for ‘Disorder’,” The Phnom Penh Post, August 19 2013. 61 Fuller, “In an Unsettled Cambodia, Preparing to Confront the Government.” 62 “Protest Turns into Clash with Police in Cambodia,” The New York Times, September 15 2013. 63 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities(New York: Random House, 1961). 64 Thomas Kolnberger, “Between Mobility and Immobility: Traffic and Public Space in Phnom Penh, Cambodia,” Pacific News 37(2012). 65 Low, On the Plaza : The Politics of Public Space and Culture, 239. 31

147

148

bibliography Bonder, Julian. “On Memory, Trauma, Public Space, Monuments, and Memorials.” Places 21, no. 1 (2009): 62. Caruth, Cathy. Trauma : Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Chandler, David. “Cambodia Deals with Its Past: Collective Memory, Demonisation and Induced Amnesia.” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 9, no. 2-3 (2008): 355-69. Chandler, David P. Voices from S-21 : Terror and History in Pol Pot’s Secret Prison. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Chanphal, Norng. “Interview with Former S-21 Child Survivor.” By Vanthan Peou Dara and Chy Terith. Documentation Center of Cambodia (February 13 2009). Chhim, Sotheara. “Baksbat (Broken Courage): A Trauma-Based Cultural Syndrome in Cambodia.” Medical anthropology: Cross Cultural Studies in Health and Illness 32, no. 2 (2013): 160-73. Craig, James A., and Matt Ozga-Lawn. Resilience. Pamphlet Architecture 32. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2012. Darden, Douglas. Condemned Building : An Architect’s Pre-Text. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1993. Derrida, Jacques. Memoirs of the Blind : The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. ———. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Translated by Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes. London; New York: Routledge, 2001. ———. “Point De Folie: Maintenant L’architecture. Bernard Tschumi: La Case Vide La Villette, 1985.” AA Files, no. 12 (1986): 65-75. Dy, Khamboly. A History of Democratic Kampuchea (1975-1979). Cambodia: Documentation Center of Cambodia, 2007.

Phnom Penh,

Edwards, Penny. “Subscripts: Reading Cambodian Pasts, Presents, and Futures through Graffiti.” In Expressions of Cambodia: The Politics of Tradition, Identity, and Change, edited by Leakthina Chan-Pech Ollier and Tim Winter. London; New York: Routledge, 2006.

149

Guillou, A. Y. “An Alternative Memory of the Khmer Rouge Genocide: The Dead of the Mass Graves and the Land Guardian Spirits.” South East Asia Research 20, no. 2 (2012): 207-26. Hejduk, John Architectural Association. Victims : A Work. Association, 1986.

London: Architectural

Hornstein, Shelley. Losing Site : Architecture, Memory and Place. Farnham, Surrey, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. Jackowski, Nannette, and Ricardo de Ostos. Ambiguous Spaces. Pamphlet Architecture 29. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008. Karlström, Anna. “Spiritual Materiality: Heritage Preservation in a Buddhist World?”. Journal of Social Archaeology 5, no. 3 (2005): 338-55. Kent, Alexandra, and David P. Chandler. People of Virtue : Reconfiguring Religion, Power and Morality in Cambodia Today. Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2008. Kiernan, Ben. Genocide and Democracy in Cambodia : The Khmer Rouge, the United Nations, and the International Community. New Haven, CT, 1993. Kreps, Christina F. Liberating Culture : Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Museums, Curation, and Heritage Preservation. London: Routledge, 2003. Ledgerwood, Judy. “Buddhist Ritual and the Reordering of Social Relations in Cambodia.” South East Asia Research 20, no. 2 (2012): 191-205. ———. “The Cambodian Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crimes: National Narrative.” Museum Anthropology 21, no. 1 (1997): 82-98. Mei, Chum. “Interview with Survivor of Tuol Sleng Prison.” By Sim Sorya. Documentation Center of Cambodia (March 23 2006). Mitterrand, Frederic. “Norodom Sihanouk, King and Filmmaker.” France, 1997. Népote, Jacques. Parenté et Organisation Sociale dans le Cambodge Moderne et Contemporain : Quelques Aspects et Quelques Applications du Modèle les Régissant. Genève; Olizane: Centre de Documentation et de Recherche sur la Civilisation khmère, 1992. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. On the Use and Abuse of History for Life. Translated by Ian Johnston. Arlington, VA: Richer Resources Publications, 2010.

150

Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire.” Representations 26, no. 1 (1989): 7-24. Panh, Rithy. “L’image Manquante.” Cambodia; France, 2013. ———. “S21: The Khmer Rouge Death Machine.” Cambodia; France, 2004. Parr, Adrian. Deleuze and Memorial Culture: Desire, Singular Memory and the Politics of Trauma. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008. Peleggi, Maurizio. “The Unbearable Impermanence of Things: Reflections on Buddhism, Cultural Memory and Heritage Conservation.” Chap. 3 In Routledge Handbook of Heritage in Asia, edited by Patrick T. Daly and Tim Winter. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2012. Sihanouk, Norodom. “Le Développement de L’instruction Publique (Education Nationale), la Jeunesse et L’essor Extraordinaire des Sports sous le Sangkum Reastr Niyum.” Photo-Souvenirs du Cambodge Sangkum Reastr Niyum 1955-69, no. 3 (1994). Springer, Simon. Cambodia’s Neoliberal Order : Violence, Authoritarianism, and the Contestation of Public Space. London; New York: Routledge, 2010. Stehle, Barbara. “Anterior Spaces at S.21.” In Difficult Memories: Reconciling Meaning, edited by Markus Berger and Liliane Wong. Interventions/Adaptive Reuse. Providence, RI: Department of Interior Architecture, Rhode Island School of Design, 2013. Thion, Serge. Watching Cambodia : Ten Paths to Enter the Cambodian Tangle. Bangkok: White Lotus, 1993. Thompson, Ashley “Buddhism in Cambodia : Rupture and Continuity.” Chap. 5 In Buddhism in World Cultures : Comparative Perspectives, edited by Stephen C. Berkwitz, 129-68. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2006. “The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum: Unesco Memory of the World Program and the Reorganization of the Museum.” UNESCO Culture Sector, http://www.unesco. org/new/en/culture/themes/dynamic-content-single-view/news/the_tuol_ sleng_genocide_museum_unesco_memory_of_the_world_program_and_the_ reorganization_of_the_museum/#.UqdfuMRDuSp. Wood, Timothy Dylan. “Touring Memories of the Khmer Rouge.” In Expressions of Cambodia: The Politics of Tradition, Identity, and Change, edited by Leakthina ChanPech Ollier and Tim Winter. London; New York: Routledge, 2006. Yathay, Pin , and John Man. Stay Alive, My Son. New York: Free Press, 1987.

151

152

Acknowledgements To Alberto Pérez-Gómez, my primary advisor, who shaped the way in which I approach architecture and encouraged me down a path I didn’t know I was capable of venturing. He trusted me to find my own rhythm, helping me to advance my project through subtle developments week by week. To Paul Holmquist and Angeliki Sioli, who diligently attended weekly meetings and followed my project closely and consistently from beginning to end. Their diverse interests rounded out discussions in Alberto’s office and their advice has been invaluable in developing my project. To my secondary advisor Ipek Türeli, and to Howard Davies and Talia Dorsey, whose criticism, advice, and works of reference at monthly reviews were necessary to provide perspective and push the development of my thesis. To Director Annmarie Adams, who helped to formulate my thesis questions and argument, and impelled me to produce an academic paper outlining my research and design argumentation. To Ron Jelaco, Ricardo Castro, Sinisha Brdar, and Andrew King, who generously gave their time to attend reviews and have hallway discussions. To the most encouraging DSR thesis class, Ji Won Jun, Julian Mirabelli, Jason Treherne, Brian Muthaliff, Vincent Désy, Émélie Desrochers-Turgeon, Vi Ngo, and Eve Lachapelle, (and honorary studio members: Kelvin, Max, and Maria) whose mere presence has helped me to remain sane in the past year, and when sanity was altogether lacking, they pretended not to think less of me. To Mr Sath Sameth, and his open-hearted family, who generously welcomed me into their home in Cambodia for two months in the summer of 2013. To Seyma, Srey Lea, Nita, Chin Long, Lee Mai, Srey Houy, Lion, Leap, Srey Lim, Lakana, Srey Jane, Vireak, Chan, Panha, Srey Leak, Polly, Li, Ly, Pon, and Sin, who through their friendship taught me so much about their culture and life and made my thesis possible. Finally, to my family, Mom, Dad, Julie, Kurt, and Kat, who were accepting of my prolonged absence from their lives, but were at my side at a moment’s notice if I even so much as insinuated that I might need help. I couldn’t have done it without you.

153