Reflections in the Water explores the intergenerational process of remembering through fragments of recreated archival material depicting the Cambodian countryside along the Mekong River. The immersive installation becomes a water sanctuary, highlighting the equally healing and destructive nature of this essential element in the tropical climate of Cambodia.
Through recreated fragments of archival material, Chhorn invites viewers into an ephemeral meditation on memory, loss, and cultural continuity. In her hauntingly poetic reimagining, the ghost of her great-grandparents’ Cambodian riverside house, now vanished due to the Mekong’s relentless erosion, becomes a vessel for reflecting on lives once lived.
Using docu-fictional techniques and Super 8-style footage, she stitches together vignettes of rural existence, rice planting, coconut cutting, communal cooking, each scene vivid yet incomplete, like memory itself. A floating house, crafted from tea-stained muslin, evokes both the murky floodwaters and the fragility of tradition. The duality of water in the tropical climate of Cambodia, essential for everyday living but equally destructive with flash flooding, speaks to the value of traditional living, the potential of a lost culture and the importance of intergenerational memory.
Allison Chhorn is a Cambodian-Australian filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist living on Kaurna Land (South Australia). Her work explores the effects of migrant displacement and post-memory through impressionistic forms across film and moving-image installation. Such works include “The Plastic House” (2019) and “Skin Shade Night Day” (2022).
