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| Jean-Francois Perigois’s photos depict Boeung Kak lake’s lingering residents against a rapidly changing landscape. Photograph: Jean-Francois Perigois |
Sean Gleeson
The Phnom Penh Post
The contentious dispute over the residents displaced from Phnom
Penh’s lakeside district has been captured in a photography exhibition
now on display at Meta House.
French photographer Jean-Francois Perigois, a resident of Cambodia
for the past five years, has spent the past 18 months compiling the
works, in the process repeatedly raising the ire of police officers
stationed to keep the Boeung Kak development site away from prying eyes.
Attempts by authorities to prevent documentation of the dramatic
changes in the neighbourhood’s landscape are what Perigois has sought to
remedy with his latest collection, Boeung Kak Was A Lake.
“Of course, it’s a controversial issue,” he says. “But I’m a witness.
I’m just providing a picture, and hopefully discussion comes from
there. People should be able to talk, to explain and to say why this is happening.“
The elegantly framed exhibition highlights the dichotomy between
Boeung Kak’s lingering residents and the machinery of development that
has drained the lake and flattened surrounding buildings.
In Watchers, two moto drivers with their backs to the lens gaze out
from an overpass into the barren gulf of what was once a thriving
community, while Death by the Mud depicts a lone man staring balefully
into the distance while perched on a drainage pipe being used to clear
the lake’s water.
In 2007, Shukaku Inc, a development consortium with ties to the
Cambodian People’s Party, was granted a 99-year lease for land around
the Boeung Kak area.
More than 4,000 residents have been moved from the site as a result of subsequent development works.
The issue of the remaining families flared up again late last month,
with the arrest of 13 Boeung Kak women who were supporting a family
trying to build a new home on land they were evicted from two years
earlier.
The women were sentenced to two-and-a-half-year jail terms.
Before their trial, monk and rights activist Loun Savath was briefly detained for leading a protest rally against the arrests.
For the photographer, the story of Boeung Kak epitomises the fraught
and uncertain path of Cambodia’s recent economic development.
“It’s so sad to see the destruction of an area that should be a
public space,” Perigois says. “The country has evolved a great deal in
the past 10 years, but sometimes in the wrong way.
“Even though it has become less poor in that time, the social
distortion between rich and poor has in many respects become larger.”
Boeung Kak Was A Lake will be on display at Meta House until Sunday, June 24.
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