Interview #215 — Allison Chhorn

by Neha Kale

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, often with other family members as subjects.

She has made numerous films including Blind Body, Missing and The Plastic House. She received the Porter St Commission from Adelaide Contemporary Experimental Gallery to make her first solo exhibition and multi-channel installation Skin Shade Night Day which was exhibited as part of The National: Australian Art Now (MCA, 2023).

Allison spoke to Neha Kale about remembering as an imaginative exercise, how our bodies imprint spaces and showing her work in Cambodia for the first time.

You are a Cambodian-Australian filmmaker and artist working across video, photography, painting and music composition. When you were growing up, your parents owned a farm in the outer suburbs of Adelaide, and the last time we spoke, you talked about the sense of moving between two worlds—learning English at school and speaking Khmer at home. In high school, you gravitated towards art. What do you think drew you to the visual as a way of expressing yourself?

Visual arts became a language that was easily accessible to me, as well as music—music being a universal language. It felt like there were no barriers to art. I remember spending a lot of time in the art room at school, during my lunch breaks. It was a safe space where I could make mistakes without any judgement. Plus, English was my worst subject and I found it difficult to communicate through words. This is why I think film became so powerful for me as an expression of feelings and ideas directly through sight and sound.

And how did you think your upbringing shaped your instincts as an artist?

The language barrier, poor communication and lack of emotional understanding between my parents and siblings and I must have influenced us. We all turned to art for comfort and expression. At that age, we also developed our own taste(s) in music, art and visual media. Considering my parents’ expectations, turning to art became a form of rebellion, even now. I also listened more than I spoke. I think listening has really shaped my instincts; mentally collecting sounds on a daily basis informs my practice.

Your acclaimed 2019 film The Plastic House revolves around a young woman who works alone in her family’s greenhouse. She busies herself with the rituals of physical labour—planting runner beans, pulling dry leaves—while imagining her life after the passing of her parents. The work inhabits a space between documentary and fiction—the viewer is never sure if her family is still alive. Like so much of your work, The Plastic House is concerned with memory itself as an imaginative exercise. What prompted The Plastic House and why is it important for you to explore the notion that memory itself is a kind of fiction?

I think the main reason why I made it was because I was living in this environment, this atmosphere, and [having] this feeling of yearning. The film was based on fear, and fear can cause you to imagine things, especially when you can hear sounds but can’t see what’s there. It was almost like a premonition, but using real locations and elements.

Creating fiction with material you already have is a way of continuing a certain timeline. Having worked like this for the past few years now, I think using imagination and memory is a way of re-living the story and keeping it alive—a story that would otherwise be forgotten. I’m fascinated by the idea that every time you remember an event you’re adding slightly different details to it; it’s always evolving through memory. There’s a process of practice and repetition as well, like building muscle memory—it becomes stronger every time.

In your short Blind Body (2021), you create an impressionistic portrait of your grandmother, Kim Nay, who survived the Khmer Rouge. She is partially blind and you started observing Kim’s daily movements in 2018, trying to make sense of her sensory encounters and how she navigates the world. How did documenting your grandmother change you as an artist?

The process of documentation for that film made me become more aware of my grandmother’s routines and habits, as well as when it was appropriate to film or not. While [I was] editing it, I was trying to put myself in her perspective—imagining her world with limited vision, relying on sounds to navigate space and memory. I also learnt about her history, from her youth, something I would not have known or dared to ask if it weren’t for making the film. [It was here that] I realised how the medium of film could be a tool for empathy.

What did it show you about the ways in which the body is imprinted with unsayable experiences or, to put it another way, how our bodies choose what to remember and what to forget?

So many things are recorded through our bodies, especially things we don’t want to say or can’t express. If my grandmother had never told anyone what she went through in the Khmer Rouge and her life before that, it would still be imprinted in her body. Furthermore, when memory starts to fail, such as from dementia like what my grandmother has, the body is the only thing that still remembers.

Your work often revolves around distances—temporal, geographical and physical. Your film Missing (2021), commissioned for Prototype, features a mother and daughter who are separated by time zones. The work, which stars your own mother and the Cambodian-American poet Monica Sok, was prompted by a photo you saw of your mother and her best friend at the Khao-I-Dong refugee camp. Why does this notion of unbridgeable distance compel you as an artist?

Although I live within close proximity to my family, I have always felt emotionally distant from them. It’s not just a language barrier, but a cultural and generational one too. Also, being conditioned to not bring things up leaves a lot that is unknown. This distance allows for a desire for connection—to fill in the gaps and form a picture to the mystery.

One thing that strikes me about your work is the way it refuses linear narratives. Instead it hinges on the ways in which generational loss and trauma can create gaps and voids in our understanding. You also work with music, and in your films, there is an interesting relationship between sound and silence. Sound—the rustle of leaves, rain, a plane flying—often flits at the edges of your protagonists’ consciousness, like a spectral presence. Can you tell me a little bit more about this connection between silence and sound in your work?

Silence can be a coping mechanism for unstable relationships and for families living with intergenerational trauma. I felt like I grew up with loud sounds and silence simultaneously. The dynamics between the two are very powerful—loud sounds feel violent and traumatic, while quieter moments leave space for respite and peaceful ambiguity.

Sound is also really emotional and taps into your heart more than images do. The sounds I use aren’t dialogue or descriptive music; they are mostly made up of natural sounds you hear in your day-to-day, that are at times heightened. I try to use sound design to create an emotional atmosphere with dramatic action [that is] happening offscreen. The offscreen sounds that you hear but can’t see suggest these spectral presences you describe, and also suggest that they happened in the past but still recur in the present.

To make your immersive installation Skin Shade Night Day (2022), which was originally exhibited at ACE Gallery in Adelaide and recently on show as part of The National in Sydney, you built a shade house on the property where your family now lives and worked with your parents to cultivate a garden. For your parents, growing fruit and vegetables are rituals that connect them to culture. Walking through the installation, there is soil on the ground, and the work, to me, is living and breathing—I really like how its described as an act of embodied empathy. Why is the shade house such a fertile metaphor for you?

I guess you could call the shade house a living metaphor. Like with the greenhouse, these garden structures have such significance for me and my family. It’s where we lived and worked, a shelter for us. It’s almost as important as having a house to live in, which is why there are also scenes inside our real house, with interior domestic activities happening in the shade house too. I’ve lived in the places where they were filmed for most of my projects.

It’s important for me to be physically immersed in the work, both for myself through the making of it and for audiences. This is where I feel embodied empathy takes place—we can understand how someone lived and worked when we experience the same physical nature and the same senses that they experienced.

For Skin Shade Night Day, I would film the scenes of my parents working in the shade house, much like an observational documentary. Later on, I would record foley sounds by re-performing the same actions my parents were doing to create a clearer and more emotionally resonant sound. For other scenes involving shadows, I would re-enact the same actions as well. One of those actions was digging the soil with a hoe, which was where my mum reminded me of how her brother injured himself with one during the Khmer Rouge. It's something I think about and feel through my body whenever I use the tool. No matter how removed the person, place or situation is, I feel connected to someone else’s experience in this way. This is why immersion and embodied experience is such an important part of the process and why I like to recreate environments so audiences can feel something similar.

As a structure, the shade house shades and protects—but it is also fragile and permeable. Why is this interplay of fragility and strength important to Skin Shade Night Day—and its exploration of invisible inheritances and the way our labour is inscribed on physical places?

The dynamics of the work creates a kind of tension: loud and quiet, light and dark, soft and hard. Stronger elements are structures for lighter elements to flow off from. The shade cloth material lets the whole space breathe, allowing light and air to pass through, giving the work a kind of aura—like it can’t hold a clear record of events but contains the spirit of it. My friend described viewing the work as an ‘[...] overwhelming sense of inhabited space, the result of which is, rather than feeling like you’re peering into someone’s life from the outside, that you are instead looking outwards as these vignettes of life on the farm happen around you.’

Labour is something that can easily be overlooked or dismissed, yet it is something we do every day. It’s as if our daily activities and rituals are absorbed into a place the more we spend time in them, like a transmission of energies. And when nobody is physically present anymore, I like to believe the spirit or essence of people and the work that they do still remains in those places.

I remember going to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Cambodia which was formerly a school. I remember being overwhelmed just by walking through the rooms, some still stained with blood and markings. In one of her poems, Monica Sok evokes the spirit of past life with the apparition of a student in the form of her nephew running through the building. I also try to evoke this idea with sound echoing across time. Although I'm not spiritually inclined in my normal waking life, somehow the experience of expanded cinema allows me to believe in these things.

When we last spoke, you were in Cambodia showing Memory House (2022), an exhibition comprising a photographic series alongside The Plastic House at Java Creative Cafe, a community arts space in Phnom Penh. What struck you most about the way audiences in Cambodia resonated with your work?

It was strange showing my work in Cambodia. The audience were unfamiliar with the landscapes and greenhouses in the photographs as they were shot in Australia. Since Cambodia is already humid, they don’t really have greenhouses. It’s a different landscape for farming, with a lot of rice fields. But they did see things that Australian audiences, who are mostly unaware of the Khmer Rouge, didn’t quite see. Cambodian audiences could see the unspoken effects of intergenerational trauma and even made their own connections to the Khmer Rouge period, even if they were unconscious on my part.

That last visit gave me a feeling of all the possibilities there; [it was] like experiencing a new place for the first time. I’d like to make work in Cambodia someday, or at least visit more regularly, to understand and absorb the place my parents grew up in.

Showing Memory House there made me realise that the kinds of things people take away from your work depends on their personal experiences, their background, etc. Also, people will just make connections depending on how open they are to it. Something totally unexpected and unplanned for with Skin Shade Night Day was kids playing with their own shadows in the video projections. So I’m not so worried about the work being ‘translatable’ to different audiences (my parents don’t get any of it), so long as it feels true to me. This is why I use sound, silence and atmosphere as a language for the inexpressible, because I don’t know how to express it any other way.

Do you have any advice for emerging filmmakers? Who inspires you?

Watch movies to discover things you like and don’t like. Learn to trust your instincts, especially if you’ve been taught otherwise. I’m inspired by other Asian Australian filmmakers such as Audrey Lam, Rae Choi, Jenn Tran, William Duan, Andy Diep, Matthew Victor Pastor and Noora Niasari.

What have you been listening/reading to?

I’m a slow reader. A few things I’m trying to finish are Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, Memoria (a chronicle of the film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul), and the Aftersun screenplay.

How do you practise self-care?

Very basic things: remembering to eat, exercise and rest well. Also changing the routine every now and then.

What does being Asian Australian mean to you?

As I get older, it means understanding your parents more and accepting both cultural aspects as part of your identity, whether or not they have impacted you negatively or positively.