15-20 January 2017
The gathering at SA SA BASSAC, and the field learning event, invited its participants to consider, together, what impels the leap into the unknown?
What attachments move us to do what we do – to make art, shape words, organise, name a collective, imagine a space, fictionalise a past and lay claim to the future? What are adequate ways to describe the energy, intensity and sentiment that suspend instrumentality and animate the move into the unknown? How do we grasp the forms and aesthetics that emerge in that time of potential? How do we stay in synch with that which moves, talk with living forms, and prolong transformative time in places fractured by impunity, acceleration and political and infrastructural failings?
A group of artists, curators, writers and makers in Southeast Asia and beyond were invited to spend a short and intensive portion of time together at SA SA BASSAC, in the hope that the alchemy of people, preoccupations and the above questions would spark ideas, speculations, promises and curiosity to be built on and acted on beyond the time together in Phnom Penh.
Participants were asked to respond to the invitation and to take part with their whole presence, ready to reflect on the kinds of attachments personal to them and their contexts that impel a continuity of involvement in making art live – acts of naming or gesturing, with precision, attachments that animate a practice, articulate a concept, a form, a position, in a way that holds open the possibility of unpredictably connecting.
The gathering took the form of lessons, in Cambodian dance and language, and in ritual object making; walks in Phnom Penh following and making the city’s map of modern cinema and architectural history; conversations, performances, provocations and screenings by local and visiting participants of the gathering; studio and site visits; and a film screening programme at Bophana Audiovisual Resource Centre.
