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In the early 2000s, several major international news outlets, along with some independent documentarians, circulated videos and articles of then seven-year-old Cambodian boy Oun Sambath with his pet giant python, Chamroeun (Khmer: ចំរើន). Their partial backstory is as follows: “My mom took me to a fortune teller who told her that we were brother and sister in a past life,” Sambath said (Kohnert, Cambodia Daily, 2011).
In my attempts to reframe the spectacle of this child and animal, as objects of curiosity, I incorporate motifs of hyper-sentimentality and ancestor worship through song—Two Hearts by Khmer artist Sokmean [1]—lyric captions, gestural editing, and positioning them atop a home shrine to refocus the precarity of human and non-human kinship against its perceived danger (i.e. predator and prey). Through this gentle intervention, the video considers our entangled gazes on the mediated reproduction of images of children from the global south.
Versions
01.14.2023
02.11.2022
ចិត្តពីរ
Two Hearts
ចិត្តពីរ
Two Hearts
In the early 2000s, several major international news outlets, along with some independent documentarians, circulated videos and articles of then seven-year-old Cambodian boy Oun Sambath with his pet giant python, Chamroeun (Khmer: ចំរើន). Their partial backstory is as follows: “My mom took me to a fortune teller who told her that we were brother and sister in a past life,” Sambath said (Kohnert, Cambodia Daily, 2011).
In my attempts to reframe the spectacle of this child and animal, as objects of curiosity, I incorporate motifs of hyper-sentimentality and ancestor worship through song—Two Hearts by Khmer artist Sokmean [1]—lyric captions, gestural editing, and positioning them atop a home shrine to refocus the precarity of human and non-human kinship against its perceived danger (i.e. predator and prey). Through this gentle intervention, the video considers our entangled gazes on the mediated reproduction of images of children from the global south.
Versions
01.14.2023
02.11.2022
Video excerpt
Installation documentation
ចិត្តពីរ (Two Hearts), 2022. One-channel video (color, sound; 2 minutes) and gold plastic home shrine. Dimensions variable. © Sopheak Sam
Research images + textual materials
Footnotes
[1] This song is a fanmade cover of สองใจ (Song Jai) by Thai singer Da Endorphine translated into Khmer and uploaded to YouTube in 2022.
[1] This song is a fanmade cover of สองใจ (Song Jai) by Thai singer Da Endorphine translated into Khmer and uploaded to YouTube in 2022.
