Sarah Freres - "Les Dames du Lac"
Les Dames du Lac
By Sarah Freres
22 September / 11 October
Opening 22 September 2015, 18h30 – 22h00
Rue de la Senne 17
B-1000
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Agenda
18h30 : Opening Doors
20h00 : Documentary Screening - Even a Bird Needs a Nest, by Vincent Trintignant-Corneau, Christine Chansou
21h00 : Discussion with the artist
22h00 : Closing Doors
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Situating itself within the photographic reportage practice, “The Ladies of the Lake” proposes an insight in the current conditions of Cambodian contradictory and violent process towards “development”, by focusing specifically on the fight for housing and land rights a group of brave women is undertaking in Phnom Penh, the capital of the country.
Forced evictions are one of the most widespread human rights violations occurring in Cambodia today. Since the Khmer Rouges’ defeat, nearly forty years ago, at least 30,000 residents of the capital city Phnom Penh have been forcibly evicted.
Until 2007, the northern part of the city was in fact covered by a 90 hectares lake. That year, nonetheless, the government decided to cover it with sand in order to launch a major urban development project that envisioned the “requalification” of the area into a luxurious, tourist-based neighbourhood. To do so the government sold the surrounding lands to a Chinese real estate company – Shukaku Inc - and violently evicted the 20,000 families living there.
Rather than fostering development, hence, the (ongoing) initiative has produced an overt violation of local inhabitants’ property and land rights and major environmental and social damages.
Sarah Freres’s work powerfully captures the pain, courage, resistance and engagement of the “Boeung Kak” movement, a citizen movement led by a group of women locally inhabiting the area and fiercely fighting for social justice and for the right to a better future.
The exhibition invites the viewer to immerge into this outer world, outer both because invisible to the majority of the international community and because of the exceptional power of the civilian struggle undergoing.
By shading some light on the too often untold story of the Boeung Kak lake specifically and of Cambodian’s political economic path more generally, we invite you to question what “development and growth actually means in the daily expansion of our globalising political thanatonomy and to start thinking of new possible horizons of fight and hope.
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About Sarah Fréres
I am a young journalist, working for a newspaper in Brussels. I just came back from a 8 months trip in Southeast Asia, where I worked for an independent Cambodia newspaper in Phnom Penh for 3 months. When I arrived in Cambodia, I was already aware of the country’s political tension and situation and knew that forced evictions were a major issue in what they call « the Kingdom of Wonders ». The first day I arrived, I took a walk around the Boeung Kak and saw something I had never seen before ; people living around the lake, on a railway line in the middle of garbage, poverty all around the place. At the edge of the railway, there was a huge building, one of the only in Phnom Penh. I soon learned that it was a bank. On the other edge, there was a pannel of the ruling party. And then, there was the lake in itself. I knew about the Boeung Kak story. I didn’t know that the lake was still empty, that the Boeung Kak story was still going on and that the Shukaku was never achieved.
I soon started to do some research about land evictions in the capital and found out that there were still a lot of slums inhabited by the former residents of Boeung Kak lake. I bought a bicycle and decided to see what was behind the scenes and document one of the biggest issues in Cambodia today. For 3 months, I followed the protests, went to the slums, the trial of the Boeung Kak ladies and met some of the leaders of the monk activists that try to defend the Cambodian population. To me, it was as well a way to discover this country, its history, its population, its angels and demons.
I am not a photographer but I always liked photography and as I was riding in the middle of Phnom Penh, I thought I should give it a try and show the people back home what I was seing in Cambodia. I wanted to show them that Cambodia is more than about the Khmer Rouges and Angkor Wat, that its fight toward democracy is far from being over. Most of all, I had the feeling that Cambodia is a country that has always been forgotten by the rest of the world, and I wanted to make it count, to tell the country that someone still cared. And the only way I could do that was to ride my bicycle, take pictures and spread the word.
Sarah Freres
