Beloved Technologies
Books and Exhibitions
Since 2010, I have conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Cambodian minefields. My videos are montages of human-animal relationships in a minefield. The first project, To Love a Rat, is a direct cinema take on Cambodian deminers as they learn to love the landmine detection rats, imported Gambian Pouched Rats trained to detect landmines. In Peace Karma Food, I offer a multi-screen montage of animal-human relationships that fulfill disarmament, karmic balance, and food in Cambodia. Check out my writing and some of my footage in an interview with The Conversation. My book project, Beloved Technologies: On bombs and rats in a Cambodian minefield was selected to be part of the Atelier workshop series with the University of California Press in 2019. The book is currently under contract with UC Press as part of that series. Below see some of the media engagements and further writing I have produced from this research.
To love a Rat
To Love a Rat is an ethnographic observational film that seeks to capture the learning process Cambodian deminers went through the first time they trained with landmine detection rats. Its footage comes from fieldwork during the rats first entrance in Cambodia in 2015. See a brief short on this work-in-progress here and other footage here.
Peace Karma Food
Peace Karma Food is a three-channel montage of human-animal relations in Cambodia that shifts the normal point of view from human to animal for three animal-human relationships related to important aspects of human life: farming, faith, and violence. The project’s title, Peace, Karma, Food refers to the human uses of the animals projected onto the walls. The project plays at the boundary between anthropology and art, juxtaposing moments from Cambodian minefields where millions of landmines are buried in the soil. In this country, where the very ground has been rendered unstable, human desires for development are clarified and certain animals come to represent such desires for food, karma, and peace. We see a cow in the small farm of a man who lives in a heavily landmine-contaminated village. The comparisons point out how our anthropocentric settings like religion, agriculture, and minefields are more ecologically entangled than we imagine. This has been shown at the EcoCultures exhibition at the Feverish World Symposium in Burlington, VT in 2018 and at the "Assembling Animal Communication" at the Texas Tech University Landmark Arts galleries in March-April 2019.
For the love of rats
For the Love of Rats is a book on human-rat relations across time and space. It is a trade book currently under contract with Liveright, Inc, a W. W. Norton & Company imprint.
peaceful minefields, perpetual war
when landmines disrupt landscapes, they are called contaminated.
how can we call into question ideas of uncontaminated and contaminated land?
Layered Lands
Layered Lands
Layered Lands was a public-facing installation of stylized faux minefields on uncontaminated land. The ‘landmines’ here were replaced by clear acrylic spheres with flowers. Designed to disrupt walkers of privileged spaces and temporalities, the spheres and flowers also mark a series of QR codes that link to stories of violent legacies in the local land, such as the takeover of indigenous lands and indigenous knowledge. It is designed so that the interactive elements can be reconfigured depending on where it is exhibited. The point here is to represent landscapes as layered—so that walkers can question the lack of ‘contamination’ in their public lands to inspire them to think about what they take for granted and to reflect on the global connectedness of their world.
Layered Lands was selected as part of the “Art on the Trails” at Beals Preserve in Southborough, MA for the Rising Up. Rising Up will be open from June 7 - September 13 2020. The landmines for the Beals Preserve featured histories of the Nipmuc people, an Indigenous people from Massachusetts who farmed and lived there during the colonial period and who currently live throughout New England.
For more about Art on the Trails and the selected artists see their website.
For more about the Nipmuc people and indigenous histories at the Southborough edition of Layered Lands, see the Landmine links under Layered Lands.
Further readings below:
Brooks, Lisa Tanya. Our beloved kin: a new history of King Philip's war. Yale University Press, 2018.
DeLucia, Christine M. Memory lands: King Philip’s War and the place of violence in the northeast. Yale University Press, 2018.
Touching Ground
Screenshot from the film, Touching Ground (2010)
The film, Touching Ground, is an observational film about living in the minefields of the K5 belt, the most densely contaminated minefield in the world. This comes from ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in 2010 in the villages of the northwestern area of Cambodia. The story follows SamChann, an amputee who cultivates a high value landless crop of oyster mushrooms in order to support his family. He teaches other families afflicted by landmines to do so, as well. His story parallels another story of a recent amputee, Hov Hou, who stepped on a landmine in 2010.