តំណក់ . DRIP

Kep wasn’t damaged during the conflicts, but the city slowly slipped into a long sleep. Nature reclaimed it and the beautiful houses disappeared. Entering these old villas felt like undertaking a huge and unique archeological journey to ancient times, not so different to the Angkor ruins! The architecture shows us a past era of modernity, revealing the lost Golden Age of Cambodia before the country’s fall. As I experience seeing the bas-reliefs on the temple walls at Angkor, I also experience seeing the walls of old villas in Kep. They are both layered with traces of human history. They endured conflict, and were marked both by nature and by human touch.

When I first began “Drip”, I photographed the walls of the old villas in Kep, capturing graffiti left by traveling artists as well as local children. But I felt a kind of disconnection from those walls. To create my own personal emotional connection with those walls, I began sketching and drawing my own graffiti with the black charcoal I found inside the villas, and photographed the results. I had no preconceived story, I took inspiration from my travels, experiences and memories in Kep.

Walls come alive …

Kep 2011 – 2012