Wounded Landscapes: Debris of War, Residual Vulnerability, and (Toxic) Intimacy in Post-Cold War Southeast Asia

Abstract

This paper investigates transnational ecologies of the vestiges of war in Southeast Asia, where a shared experience of vulnerability has become the very condition of everyday reality and aesthetic expression. Focusing on the legacies of the U.S. bombardment campaigns in Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand during the Second Indochina War, I look at how artists and filmmakers such as Allan Sekula (USA), Tada Hengsapkul (Thailand) Vandy Rattana (Cambodia), and Xaisongkham Induangchanthy (Laos), document the lingering effects—and affects—of Cold War atrocities through topographic aesthetics. Attentive to the materiality of space, these artists and filmmakers transform the wounded landscape into a locus of “residual vulnerability,” a corporeal and environmental exposure to explosive remnants of war that allow for artistic articulations of toxic—injurious yet constitutive—forms of intimacy and agency. Situating this artistic practice within post-Cold War geopolitics and the politics of reparation, I will discuss spatial configurations of residual vulnerability in contemporary visual and literary cultures as critiques of American exceptionalism, post-socialist revolutionary pathos, and ASEAN regionalist sentiment.

Citation: Polmuk, Chairat “Wounded Landscapes: Debris of War, Residual Vulnerability, and (Toxic) Intimacy in Post-Cold War Southeast Asia” The Jugaad Project, 3 June 2021, thejugaadproject.pub/wounded-landscapes [date of access]

Introduction: Blissful Exposure

Fig. 1: Explosive bliss (Tada Hengsapkul’s Under the Same Sky, 2016). Courtesy of the artist and Nova Contemporary.

In his mixed media installation showcased at the Nova Contemporary gallery in Bangkok in 2016, the Thai artist Tada Hengsapkul used a hundred pieces of inert bomblets to form the word “BLISS” (fig. 1) Acquired from an armory in his hometown in Nakhon Ratchasima, these bomblets are remnants of the U.S. covert bombings in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam during the Second Indochina War. With this extratextual information in mind, “Bliss” can be read as a critique of ideological and military alignments between Thailand and the United States during the Cold War. The blissful state of Thailand under the U.S. aegis is inseparable from a violent history of anticommunist suppression in the region. In bearing witness to past violence, “Bliss” also suggests an enduring rhetoric of bliss in today’s politics of reconciliation and historical amnesia both in Thailand and across ASEAN. Through his artistic mediation of debris of war, Tada reframes Cold War geopolitics and its afterlife in affective terms, mobilizing the feeling of euphoria to expose––or, indeed, explode––the silenced history of Cold War atrocities.

Fig. 2: Nakedness and the injurious landscape (Tada Hengsapkul’s Under the Same Sky, 2016). Courtesy of the artist and Nova Contemporary.

Against a blissful closure of the wounded past, Tada’s exhibition evokes exposure to explore the post-Cold War landscape of vulnerability. In a video that accompanies the installation piece, Tada centers on nakedness as a way to dramatize a corporeal and environmental exposure to injurious remains of war (fig. 2). Two naked and markedly gendered bodies are depicted wrestling with each other, their entire heads covered with white cloths. Their temporary lack of visual perception foregrounds a sense of touch––their skin against the surface of the landscape, their hands clenching in tension. Surrounded by spectral traces of the American Secret War, this tactile sensory inaugurates a unique form of intimacy, a proximity and attachment to something historically injurious and materially toxic. Through an artistic staging of bare corporeality, the artist seems to ask: How are we to reinhabit the space of wounding as it becomes the very ground of our existence? How can we understand exposure not as a manifestation of victimhood but an articulation of political critique and agency?

In this essay, I take Tada’s work as a recent instantiation of artistic efforts during past decades to reckon with legacies of the U.S. bombing campaign in Southeast Asia. This includes a short documentary by the American artist and filmmaker Allan Sekula, a narrative short, Those Below (Tok Khang, 2016) by the Lao director and founding member of the Lao New Wave Cinema Xaisongkham Induangchanthy, and a photography series and video installation, Bomb Ponds (2009) by the Cambodian artist Vandy Rattana.  What binds together these materials is their keen attention to affective relations between the materiality of space and the body. I look at these affective relations––blissful or otherwise––through two interrelated concepts of residual vulnerability and toxic intimacy. By “residual vulnerability,” I refer to an experience of corporeal and environmental wounding that bears witness to the temporality of historical injury. My attempt to unpack temporal and historical layers of material remains resonates with works by scholars such as Ann Stoler, in her edited volume Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruinations, and Vatthana Pholsena and Oliver Tappe, in their edited volume, Interactions with a Violent Past: Reading Post-Conflict Landscapes in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. Stoler’s discussion on ruination in relation to colonialism informs my understanding of residual vulnerability. Stoler writes,

Ruination is an act perpetrated, a condition to which one is subject, and a cause of loss. These three senses may overlap in effect, but they are not the same. Each has its own temporality. Each identifies durations and moments of exposure to a range of violences and degradations that may be immediate or delayed, subcutaneous or visible, prolonged or instant, diffuse or direct. [1]

Ruination, I would further suggest, not only speaks to a historical experience of decomposition, but also of composition, of new forms of sociality and relationality that emerge out of a shared space of devastation. Debris of war such as unexploded ordnances are injurious and toxic, and I am interested in how artists mobilize toxicity to reconfigure our entangled relations with such injurious residues of war. More importantly, how might we understand this mobilization of residual toxicity and vulnerability as an aesthetic effort to pollute the state-sponsored rhetoric of reparation and reconciliation?

Central to my argument is certainly a critique of American exceptionalism but also decidedly an expansion of this critical approach to other forms of reparation politics, namely, nationalist narratives of revolution, and regionalist historical revisionism. In a post-socialist nation such as the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, for example, I identify a melancholic attachment to revolutionary narratives of national liberation and recovery as another blockage of historical accountability. As scholars such as Grant Evans and Oliver Tappe have noted, despite the socioeconomic tendencies toward liberalization in the early 1990s, the realm of Lao politics witnessed the consolidation of the political authority of the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party (LPRP) through various mnemonic modalities. Indeed, the commemorative impulse that came to shape Lao cultural and aesthetic landscapes in the early 1990s derived partly from an intensifying sense of revolutionary pathos following the dissolution of communism on a global scale and, more locally, the transition within the Lao communist regime. The death of Kaysone Phomvihane, a leader of the LPRP in November 1992 gave rise to a massive-scale reconstruction of memories of revolutionary struggles through museum and other curatorial and religious discourses.[2] It is within the post-socialist conjunctures of new economic paradigms and emergent modes of political legitimation that spatial configurations of past U.S. military violence become central to Lao revolutionary affective history. Through symbolic and actual clearances of war debris in postwar landscapes, as Oliver Tappe suggests, the healing of topographical wounds is deliberately linked to the reparation of historical injuries.[3]

Moving away from the depoliticized notion of vulnerability that serves to harness the post-socialist nostalgia for the revolutionary past or the U.S. redemptive aspiration, my analysis of aesthetic mediations of war debris that follows is an attempt to reintroduce political urgency into the discussion about post-Cold War ruins in relation to historical justice. Insofar as a history of the U.S bombing is embodied in the very substance of war debris, I argue that a demand for historical justice and responsibility needs to address the potential of inanimate matter to animate novel forms of political and aesthetic interventions.

As a scholar whose primary focus is an interdisciplinary study of Southeast Asian literature and visual culture, my inquiry in this essay is informed by literary and cultural theories, especially those that stress the political significance of affect and emotion. My essay is a thematic and formal analysis of visual objects rather than an ethnographic study of postwar landscapes in the region.[4] Films and artworks I examine here mostly concern experiences of toxic ecologies in post-socialist Laos. This is not only because the country belongs to my research interests but also because Laos is, historically speaking, the most heavily bombed country per capita while the impact of such violence has arguably received little scholarly attention, especially from the perspectives of visual culture studies.

Wounds: Vulnerability and Redemptive History

I also know that the remnants of war continue to shatter lives here in Laos. Many of the bombs that were dropped were never exploded. Over the years, thousands of Laotians have been killed or injured––farmers tending their fields, children playing. The wounds––a missing leg or arm––last a lifetime…Given our history here, I believe that the United States has a moral obligation to help Laos heal. 

–– Barack Obama, “Remarks of President Obama to the People of Laos,” September 6, 2016.

Allan Sekula’s A Short Film for Laos (2007) opens with markedly American wounds: an undepicted injury of a fallen cowboy taken from a televised Western movie and Sekula’s own still-festering wound from an accident during his filming excursion to northern Laos in 2006. Following the intimate prologue to vulnerability, Sekula’s film shifts to a scarred landscape of wartime memory—the Plains of Jars in Xieng Khouang Province, Laos, where over 75,000 tons of explosives were dropped during the American secret air war from 1964 to 1973. The transition between these inaugural shots thus maps the skin of the mediated and individualized body onto the surface of Cold War atrocities.

Sekula’s idea for his short film stemmed from his earlier encounter with Fred Branfman’s 1972 collection of unofficial testimonial records titled, Voices from the Plain of Jars: Life under an Air War, which he had read during the war. Compelled by the memory of this rare eyewitness account on the U.S. secret war written by ordinary villagers of Laos, Sekula states that, “As an American, I felt an obligation to visit the Plain of Jars, to see what we had done here.”[5] Here I examine the notions of vulnerability and redemption in Sekula’s depictions of ruined landscapes to problematize the desire for redemptive history. Throughout the film, the filmmaker self-reflexively appears as an American figure who seeks to document the lingering effects––and affects––of the American bombing campaign in Laos with a sense of guilt and ethical obligation.

Sekula’s self-critique of a seemingly redemptive undertaking can be grasped from the opening shot of this film, which references the trope of territorial expansion by replay a clip from an American Western film, in order to tether the legacy of American imperialism during the Cold War to his own artistic investment in postwar Lao landscapes. Sekula is well-known for his critical views on the discourse of Cold War humanism, expressed explicitly in his 1981 essay on Edward Steichen’s photography exhibition and book, The Family of Man, first shown at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 1955 and subsequently transported to multiple galleries around the world with U.S. government support and sponsorships by partner corporations such as Coca-Cola.[6] Sekula, like Roland Barthes before him, expresses a strong disdain for the overriding discourse of liberal humanism that led Steichen to group 503 photographs of racially and sexually diverse people under allegedly universalist subjects such as love and marriage, life and death, and work and recreation.[7] Linking the enduring Cold War rhetoric of familialism to more recent historical events such as the spectacularized Vietnam POW “homecoming,” Sekula argues, “The peaceful world envisioned by The Family of Man is merely a smoothly functioning international market economy, in which economic bonds have been translated into spurious sentimental ties, and in which overt racism appropriate to earlier forms of colonial enterprise has been supplanted by the ‘humanization of the other’ so central to the discourse of neocolonialism.” In light of this historical critique of post-Cold War neocolonial conditions, we might ask how Sekula’s film diverges from this entrenched discourse of liberal humanism.

I approach A Short Film for Laos through Sekula’s notion of “sympathetic materialism” that describes, as Benjamin Young succinctly glosses it, “the patient, careful attention of the photographer to the conditions and details of everyday life seen from below, especially the impingements and labors of the body.”[8] Here Sekula, with a documentary, hand-held aesthetic, documents traces of the war that come to define quotidian realities as well as socioeconomic conditions in Laos. Composed of nonlinear visual vignettes, the film’s keen attention to the rhythms of everyday encounters with war debris and other materials points to Sekula’s awareness of the limit of liberal sentimentality. By focusing on the mundane and material aspects of postwar landscapes, Sekula understands sympathy here not as a matter of mimetic identification (that often lends itself to the normalizing therapeutic paradigm) but of attentiveness and self-reflexive distancing, something akin to Lauren Berlant’s idea of the “aesthetic attention to absorption, to standing back to capture the historical mood of the present in suspension within the unfolding situation.”[9]

In the first topographic snippet of the ruined landscapes, Sekula is at the Plain of Jars with a Lao tour guide who shows him a cave filled with 400 Buddha images, each of which represents a villager who was killed by the U.S. bombing raid in 1969. As the tour guide recounts this brutal incident and describes an annual Buddhist commemoration, Sekula’s hand-held camera lingers briefly on a human skull surrounded by incense sticks inside the cave. At risk of aligning itself with a disturbing globalizing trend of “dark tourism,” the film makes no attempt to avoid the fact that the tourism industry has shouldered substantial pedagogical labor in the face of historical amnesia and political constraints. This kind of labor is then tied to other laboring bodies such as those of blacksmiths, brickmakers, charcoal workers, and gravel gatherers as the film moves from the wounded landscape of the Plain of Jars to the communities of Ban Don Keo and Ban Hat Hian in rural Luang Prabang. 

With his fascination with the materiality of space and the everyday, Sekula follows the “story of metal” that threads these various scenes of labor together. He writes, “In the retelling, the story of war and the ‘mystery of the jars’ begins to intertwine. An ancient civilization forged an electrical connection to the sky and a secret magnetism brought American bombers to earth, where they were refashioned into spoons […] The ancient Greeks tell us that the god of the forge chased the young goddess of war. In Laos, the guiding spirit of the forge is a scavenger, picking up after the demons of war.”[10]  Here Sekula is referring to the tour guide’s account about a local legend and the French colonial discovery of the magnetic field of the Plain of Jars, which partly explains why many American airplanes crashed over the site during the war. Invoking the figure of a scavenger, Sekula describes a social reality in postwar Laos in which relics of war such as detonated bombs and collapsed airplanes are transformed into household tools and utensils. Unlike the Benjaminian allegorical figure of a ragpicker that describes a poetic mediation of industrial debris, the scavenger here figures an actual, de-dramatized mode of adaptation and survival under conditions of social and environmental vulnerability.

Suturing fragmentary scenarios of ruination and embodied labor together, the recurring motif of fire denotes both destructive and creative potentialities. If a history of American bombardment deeply rooted in the Plain of Jars’s ruined landscape evokes a destructive fire, the forges of the blacksmiths and the hearths of the charcoal workers and brickmakers suggest an ongoing process of regeneration in the aftermath of an explosive devastation. The poetic use of light and fire to map a spectral relationship between past and present culminates in the filming of Boun Ok Phansa, a Buddhist annual festival held at the annual end of the three-month rains retreat. As the handheld camera captures the frenzied movements of the crowd and of light along the Nam Khan River, the film lingers on a fireboat (huafai) in which offerings for the dead are placed before the boat is released into the Mekong River and consumed by flames. This “festival of light” can be linked to the Buddhist funerary site at the Plain of Jars where the ghosts of war are commemorated annually. Thus, while documenting unfolding scenes of touristic, economic, or festive activities in contemporary Laos, Sekula’s film persistently reminds us how the spectral traces of war become the ground upon which the new political economy takes shape.

While Sekula states explicitly that, as an American, he feels an obligation to visit the Plain of Jars and to see the repercussions of the war, his film does not make an injured history of wartime violence the sole narrative about Laos in a way that would make his filmic undertaking into a redemptive project. Rather, Sekula is particularly concerned with how the traces of war can be imaginatively linked to ongoing processes of life-building under emerging pressures of globalization and capitalism. History is learned as part of such monotonous yet reassuring rhythms of labor and survival. Guided by the spirit of scavenging and salvaging, this de-dramatized filmic meditation on precarious socioeconomic transformations allows us to seek, amidst the ruin, the possibilities for livability and coexistence within environmental disturbance. As Anna Tsing writes in a different context, “Global landscapes today are strewn with this kind of ruin. Still, these places can be lively despite announcements of their death; abandoned asset fields sometimes yield new multispecies and multicultural life. In a global state of precarity, we don’t have choices other than looking for life in this ruin.”[11] In post–Cold War Laos, the ruined landscapes function as spaces for new forms of economic activity, commemorative practice, and historical imagination.

 

Relics: Remnants of War and Buddhist Temporality of Mourning

Remnants of war which constitute a shared space of vulnerability also function as objects of mourning. Buddhist mourning rituals, for example, often involve care for the dead’s remains, indicating a prolonged attachment to the materiality of death.[12] In the war-torn landscapes of Southeast Asia, this Buddhist understanding of affective entanglements between the mournful subject and object sheds light on the material aspect of an ecology of wounding, of living with the injurious remains of war and the fragmented remnants of the dead. As Ann Stoler’s notion of ruination highlights the temporal dimension of violence and degradation, I examine how Buddhist-informed mediations of debris of war bear witness to an expanded temporality of historical injury. My example, Xaisongkham Induangchanthy’s narrative short titled, Those Below, is also concerned with the legacies of U.S. bombings but told from a Lao perspective.

Unlike Allan Sekula’s documentary in which a narrative of American guilt and its accompanying ethical imperatives appear at an extradiegetic level and in a self–reflexive manner, Xaisongkham’s narrative short titled, Those Below, thematically concentrates on an ethical drama revolving around generational difference and historical amnesia. The film’s simple narrative structure involves the trope of return, namely, that of an American veteran who returns to Laos in the aftermath of the war to redeem himself from his past guilt. The film’s poster summarizes this dramatization of American guilt and moral responsibility in a sentence: “Eventually you have to take care of those left behind and those left below.” As in the title, “those below” here signifies the dead and also links such death to explosive remains (as signified by its Lao title, Tok Khang, literally “remains, residues”) of war—undetonated munitions buried under the ground all over the Lao country. As remnants of war are associated––or, indeed, equated––with the Lao people (“those left behind”), the film makes explicit its pedagogical demand for historical recognition of wartime violence and its continuing repercussions.

 Fig. 3-4: Female emotional/embodied labor and the landscape of sorrow (Xaisongkham Induangchanthy’s Those Below, 2016). Courtesy of the filmmaker.

Xaisongkham Induangchanthy, a City College of New York graduate in film and video production, is among the dedicated young filmmakers who use the filmic medium to promote social and political engagement. Those Below is indeed the first Lao film that deals directly with remnants of war in an attempt to unearth the unfinished business of Lao-U.S. politics of redemption. Unlike previous Western documentary films about war debris in Laos such as Kim Mordaunt’s Bomb Harvest (2007), Those Below combines the language of humanitarianism and factuality often found in documentary film with a fictional mode of filmmaking. The film’s female protagonist is a volunteer who works for a UXO-mining team and who embodies a melancholic knowledge of the American Secret War. Two central scenes attest to this kind of melancholic and pedagogical embodiment. In the first scene, the American veteran is explaining to his son the reason he left his family to live with a Lao family in Xiangkhouang. During the Second Indochina War, he joined a team of soldiers involved in the U.S. air raid in Laos and became close friends with Neng Yang, a Hmong villager in northern Laos where the team was based. They separated when the war ended and the veteran was left with a strong sense of guilt. A few decades after the war, he returns to Laos to find out that Neng Yang has died, leaving his daughter, Luck, with her grandparents. The veteran’s voice is intercut with Luck lighting incense to pay respect to her deceased parents (fig. 3). Here, a Buddhist mode of grief and mourning brings (feminine) emotional labor to bear on historical injustice and responsibility. While the veteran’s confessional remarks to his son have a direct pedagogical function, Luck’s grief seems to exceed such a redemptive narrative.

In another scene, Luck is at her routine work as a UXO-mining volunteer. She is shown standing lifelessly in a dry rice field under which unexploded ordnance is buried (fig. 4). Her laboring body and heightened vulnerability outline an affective contour of postwar Lao landscapes, a melancholic atmosphere that has become a context of life and work. The scene culminates in an explosion of undetonated bombs, which leads to a heated conversation between the veteran and his son about this life-risking business and about the father’s plan to bring Luck to the United States with him. Luck breaks her silence, insisting that she will never leave her country and will continue to work as a UXO–mining volunteer despite her “fear to live on her own land.” Thus, while Those Below evokes American guilt as its point of departure, the film focuses more on the agency of Lao, who transform their ruined landscapes into inhabitable spaces. Grounding its story in an actual project of bomb disposal by local female volunteers, the film presents the vulnerable (and feminized) landscapes of Laos not as a site of victimhood but of resilience and empowerment.

Xaisongkham’s attentiveness to mourning in relation to agency is also rooted in Lao literary discourse on the legacies of the U.S. bombings. The film’s protagonist, for instance, might reminds readers of modern Lao literature of Buttakaew, a character in Bounthanong Xomxayphol’s S.E.A Write award-winning short story titled, “American Bones” (Khadouk Amelika, 1988). Like Luck in Those Below, Buttakaew has lost his parents to war devastation and his mournful reflection on loss is tied to an excavation of remnants of war. Buttakaew is a veteran of the communist Pathet Lao movement who later joins the MIA search team from Hawai‘i as a local assistant. As Buttakaew dutifully collects bone fragments of American soldiers, a flashback unfolds in a poignant reflection on loss and mourning: “Whenever Buttakaew reflected on the war, he felt disgust and a great pain in his heart…Much of his family and relatives had fallen victims to American bombs. There were no bone fragments left over to place in a funeral urn [that in Lao, from Pali dathu “reliquary”].”[13] This melancholic contemplation thematizes the violence of war not only through the loss of life but also through the absence of life’s remains, the traces that would allow for proper Buddhist mourning ritual.

In both the film and the short story, Buddhist practices present a mode of remembrance that highlights individual grief (and grievance) as an act of ethical responsibility in the wake of loss. Buttakaew and Luck are survivors of war whose works involve the clearance of remains of war, and whose mournful relations to past violence compel us to contemplate on the tension between remembrance and erasure. While the politics of mourning in these works is explicitly directed toward the U.S. rhetoric of reparation, we can consider their Buddhist-informed mediations of wartime remains as an interrogation of another form of reparation, namely, the revolutionary discourse of national recovery. As scholars such as Oliver Tappe and Vatthana Pholsena have pointed out, curatorial and commemorative practices after 1975 regarding remains of war are often subsumed under nationalist narratives of revolution.[14] In state museums, for example, remnants of war such as unexploded ordnance debris are placed alongside sculptures or photographs of revolutionary heroes to evoke a sense of pride and sacrifice. Departing from this enduring nationalist discourse of revolution in which collective loss is instrumental for the glorification of socialist victory, Xaisongkham’s film focuses on the unmourned loss of the ordinary Lao and the aftereffects of war that continue to haunt the present.

Fig. 5: A Lao teenager in diaspora pays respect to his father’s remains enshrined in a Buddhist stupa (Xaisongkham Induangchanthy’s A Long Way Home, 2018). Courtesy of the filmmaker.

It is worth mentioning that references to Buddhist modes of commemoration as a subtle critique of nationalist history are also present in Xaisongkham’s more recent film titled, A Long Way Home (Kap Ban, 2018). The film tells a story of a Lao teenager in diaspora on his journey to a small village in Luang Prabang to attend a ceremony of enshrinement for his father’s remains (fig. 5). The film does not provide any biographical details about the deceased father but the film’s epigraph suggests that that his exile is the result of the civil war in Laos: “When the Communist Pathet Lao came to power in 1975, Laotians who served the royal family or fought against the government fled the country.” Thus, while Those Below focuses on the continuing impact of the U.S. bombings, A Long Way Home explores Cold War violence in the aftermath of communist victory. Both films invoke Buddhist notions of relics to query the rhetoric of reparation and the politics of erasure in dominant narratives of the Cold War. In A Long Way Home, the Buddhist ceremony of relic veneration affords a mundane yet affectively charged setting for a meditation on the shattered sociality and the diasporic experience of displacement which has not been yet recognized in socialist-nationalist historiography. Relics, like other material remains of war that constitute the postwar ecologies of Laos, affectively bind together the dead and the living, the past and the present, and thus ultimately resists the foreclosure of critical engagements with historical injury.

Lands: Spatial Witnessing and Geopolitical Critique

If ghosts unsettle time, then landscape measures time. Landscape is a record of time––it holds history and “remembers” it materially.

–– Patricia Keller, Ghostly Landscapes  

Aesthetic and affective investments in blasted topographies compel us to scrutinize further how spaces can be related to post–Cold War geopolitics. What does it mean to posit the wounded landscape as an archive of historical injury and how does this poetics of spatial witnessing operate as a mode of geopolitical critique? To answer these questions, I turn to Vandy Rattana’s photographic work and short film together titled, Bomb Ponds (2009), a documentation of Cambodia’s wounded landscapes and the enduring effects of the Second Indochina War. Rattana’s photographic and filmic record of bomb craters in rural Cambodia offers a comparative perspective on the history of the U.S. bombing operation. As in Laos, an artistic practice profoundly grounded in the use of landscape has emerged to flesh out the temporality of wounding and the materiality of wartime atrocities.

Fig. 6: A serene yet haunting landscape created by bomb craters (Vandy Rattana, Bomb Ponds, 2009). Courtesy of the artist.

A pairing of nine still photographs and a 23-minute video, Bomb Ponds vacillates between picturesque landscape art and the documentary conventions of factual investigation. Photographs of bomb craters surrounded by lush green rice fields or dense forests constitute the scenic, yet uncanny, vistas of Cambodia’s postwar landscapes (fig. 6). Rattana’s encounter with these bomb craters is quite incidental and the incidental nature of his discovery illuminates how official histories fail to take into account traces of past violence. During his production of another series of photographs, Walking Though (2009), which explores the landscape of Cambodian rubber plantations, Rattana became struck by what local people called “bomb ponds” (rondau be), perfectly circular ponds filling in the craters of massive explosions. Unsettled by the absence of any official record of this physical evidence of U.S. bombing, Rattana travelled to 10 severely affected provinces in eastern and southern Cambodia to document these spectral traces of war. Each photograph in the Bomb Ponds series is named after the province where it was taken, such as Prey Veng, Kompong Cham, and Takeo. While Rattana is primarily concerned with the evidentiary aspect of these bomb craters, his photographic work straddles the line between documentary photography and art. Without any particular historical framing, Rattana’s photographs are imbued with atmospheric qualities that evoke feelings of both serenity and uncanniness. The craters that often appear at the center of each photograph draw viewers’ attention to the conspicuous “scars” of the landscape and beckon closer scrutiny.

In his essay on the landscape photography of abandoned Holocaust concentration camps, Ulrich Baer examines how such putatively decontextualized and romanticized photographs of former sites of atrocity offer the “experience of place” that exceeds the historicist and formalist approaches to photographic witnessing. “These pictures,” Baer notes, “show us that the Holocaust’s empty sites are radically inhospitable and that attempts to inhabit them ex post facto, through emphatic identification and imaginary projection via transferential bonds, is illusory at best.”[15] The deliberate evacuation of historical references in these landscape photographs thus points to the limits of historical representation, the limits that speak to the nature of traumatic experience and of the viewer’s ethical positioning in the act of secondary witnessing. Along these lines, we might understand Rattana’s photographic practice in Bomb Ponds as an attempt to highlight a historical rupture, an uncanny sense of spatial and temporal disjuncture that compels viewers to link “the need to fit placeless memories into an imagined or imaginary place with the search for moral bearings and a point of view.”[16] By making the materiality of space a site to grasp historical layering and affective sedimentation of past violence, Rattana’s photographic work not only points to the unrepresentable nature of trauma (as Baer has argued in the context of post-Shoah landscape photography) but also demonstrates how traumatic experience can disperse in time and space, diffused in entangled relations between places and people.

The video component of Bomb Ponds, which can be seen as either the supplement or the centerpiece of the photographic work, also combines the atmospheric qualities of landscape art with documentary aesthetics. The video’s establishing shot shows the vast landscape of a rice field in the background as villagers pass by on their vehicles. This idyllic portrayal of the Cambodian countryside is accompanied by the melancholic sound of traditional Khmer music known as chapey. Kung Nay, a chapey player, laments an uncertainty about the future of Cambodia that prefaces the film’s overall thematic concern about how the country’s future cannot be imagined without taking into account violent traces of the past.

I am Kung Nay, a poor traditional chapey player. 

Everyone always asks me questions. 

You want me to tell you what the future will bring to Cambodia. 

In my opinion, I would only be guessing. 

But as a chapey player, I only pray every day.

As Kung Nay is chanting, the video’s close-ups shift our attention from the inaugural scene of the everyday lives of Cambodian farmers to the landscape itself. At the end of the sequence, a bomb pond that we first saw in the background becomes the center of the frame. With the materiality of sound, the landscape becomes affectively charged and historically significant. Viewers are left to wonder how this landscape––which at once appears as a source of life and a scar on the land––can be connected to the past and the future of Cambodia.

Following opening credits that provide additional clues on how the film’s topographic aesthetics should be understood historically, archival aerial footage from an American plane during an air raid is shown. This footage reappears at the end of the film with another kind of chanting––a Buddhist chanting that resembles a blessing or a funeral hymn. In response to my question about the source of the chanting, Rattana replied that he understands this Buddhist mantra as the “sound of a separation between reality and myth.”[17] If we think of Buddhism as myth, as Rattana seems to suggest, the use of the Buddhist chanting here resonates with the chapey music in that it imagines Cambodia’s past and future in a way that moves beyond historical realism and conventional documentary aesthetics. Archival footage of an American bombing raid may provide the “reality” of this historical event but it is the melancholic soundscape created by traditional Khmer music and Buddhist chanting that has the evocative power to convey the embeddedness of history in everyday experience.

Rattana’s interviews with three villagers from Takeo and Ratanakiri provinces who survived this violent episode of U.S. bombings between 1964 and 1973 shed light on how the memory of loss is profoundly tied to the landscape. For them, bomb ponds are reminders of an experience of loss and violence. The bomb craters sometimes clearly function as evidence of political violence, as one survivor, Mi Mot, puts it: “This is the evidence that cannot be denied. These bomb ponds made by Americans have killed my relatives. These belong to Americans.” This evidentiary value, nonetheless, is exceeded by the affective charge of the landscape itself. Primarily, Rattana is concerned with the affective entanglement between a human subject and space, and the way in which the atmospheric quality of the landscape elicits affective responses or conjures up past memories. Indeed, a moment after his remark about the bomb crater as evidence, Mi Mot is consumed by grief and memories of his grandmother’s tragic death during the U.S. bombings. As he mourns the loss of his grandmother, the camera lingers on the unspeakable landscape, as if to suggest a kind of melancholia that is not individualized but dispersed across space and time.

The poetics of spatial witnessing in Bomb Ponds is inextricably linked to the film’s critique of Cold War geopolitics. Toward the end of film, Rattana’s interlocutors express their demands for historical accountability. One of them demands that the United States fill up the bomb craters, a practical and symbolic act of wound healing. At the same time, some of them tell Rattana that the bomb ponds are, paradoxically, sources of life as they provide water for rice farming and animals. Here we witness, again, an interplay between destruction and creation through which the notion of futurity is articulated. The bomb pond, the evidence of a destructive force, is surrounded by a form of life, a life that grows out of environmental precarity.

Conclusion

In this essay, I have discussed how artists and filmmakers such as Allan Sekula (USA), Xaisongkham Induangchanthy (Laos), Vandy Rattana (Cambodia), and Tada Hengsapkul (Thailand) transform the wounded landscape of post-Cold War Southeast Asia into a locus of residual vulnerability, a corporeal and environmental exposure to explosive remnants of war that allow for artistic articulations of toxic—injurious yet constitutive—forms of intimacy and agency. While working almost separately, these artists and filmmakers reveal a shared commitment to reckon with the U.S. bombardment campaigns during the Second Indochina War and its aftermath. Their prevailing attentiveness to the materiality of space foregrounds affective relations between humans and inanimate objects such as debris of war, showing how people reinhabit the landscape of wounding as it becomes their everyday reality and the very ground of their existence.  

These affective relations also suggest the expanded temporality of wounding that can be read against attempts to cover up historical injuries and, thus, to foreclose the possibility of justice and responsibility. I have identified this kind of reparative politics in three domains, namely, the U.S. rhetoric of redemption, nationalist narratives of revolution, and regionalist politics of reconciliation. Keeping the wounds open, these artists and filmmakers suggest, is to resist the restricted temporal conceptions that such narratives of reparation propose. Buddhism further provides these artists and filmmakers an important source for their mediations on temporal layers of vulnerability. References to Buddhism are variably present in these works: the Buddhist festival for the deceased in Sekula’s A Short Film for Laos, the cult of relic veneration in Xaisongkham’s Those Below, and the Buddhist chanting in Vandy Rattana’s Bomb Ponds. Altogether, Buddhist practices offer glimpses into indigenous modes of remembrance, of mournful relations to past violence that cannot be subsumed under the revolutionary or nationalist narratives of collective loss.

Situating these works in a broader context, we can consider their keen attention to the wounded landscapes as contributing to recent efforts in the domain of contemporary art and visual culture to take into account what David Teh has called the “transnational revenants” of the Cold War.[18] Against the regionalist sentiment, especially with regard to ASEAN-driven economic aspirations, Teh proposes that any renewed internationalism after the Cold War must reckon with political violence and historical injustices in the region. As my analysis has shown, the haunting aftereffects of the Cold War can be materialized in mundane objects such as debris of war. These spectral traces of the Cold War create a shared space of ruination that unsettles both the nationalist and regionalist discourse of reconciliation.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Tada Hengsupkul, Xaisongkham Induangchanthy, and Vandy Rattana for their generosity and willingness to share their works with me. I am greatly indebted to Arnika Fuhrmann, Matt Reeder, Emiko Stock, Elizabeth Wijaya, Yagna Chowdhuri, and Natalie Nesvaderani, for their insightful comments on an earlier draft of the essay. My special thanks go to two anonymous reviewers whose constructive feedback contributed to the present shape of this essay.

References   

Baer, Ulrich. “To Give Memory a Place: Contemporary Holocaust Photography and the Landscape Tradition.” In Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005.

Barthes, Roland. “The Great Family of Man.” In Mythologies. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 2013. 

Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.

Bounthanong Xomxayphol. “Kaduk Amelika [‘American Bones’].” In Poi Nok [Freeing Birds]. Trans. Peter Koret. Vientiane: Laodouangdeuane Publishing House, 2011.

Evans, Grant. The Politics of Ritual and Remembrance: Laos since 1975. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1998.

Keller, Patricia. Ghostly Landscapes: Film, Photography, and the Aesthetics of Haunting in Contemporary Spanish Culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015.

Kwon, Heonik. Ghosts of War in Vietnam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 

Langford, Jean. Consoling Ghosts: Stories of Medicine and Mourning from Southeast Asians in Exile. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.

Obama, Barack. “Remarks of President Obama to the People of Laos.” September 6, 2016, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/09/06/remarks-president-obama-people-laos. Accessed September 12, 2016.

Rattana, Vandy. E-mail correspondence with the author. September 6, 2017.

Sekula, Allan. “Artist Statement.” In The Quiet in the Land, Luang Prabang, Laos. New York: The Quiet in the Land, Inc., 2009. 

Sekula, Allan. “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (Winter 1986): 3-64.

Sekula, Allan. “The Traffic in Photography.” Art Journal 41, 1 (Spring 1981): 15-25.

Stoler, Ann. “The Rot Remains’: From Ruins to Ruination.” In Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination. Ed. Ann Stoler (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013.

Tappe, Oliver. “National Lieu de Mémoire vs. Multivocal Memories: The Case of    Viengxay, Lao PDR.” In Interactions with a violent past: Reading Post-Conflict    Landscapes in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. Eds. Vatthana Pholsena and Oliver Tappe. Singapore: NUS Press: 2013.

Teh, David. Thai Art: Currencies of the Contemporary. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2017.

Tsing, Anna. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.

Vatthana Pholsena. “A Social Reading of a Post-Conflict Landscape: Route 9 in Southern Laos.” In Interactions with a violent past: Reading Post-Conflict Landscapes in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. Eds. Vatthana Pholsena and Oliver Tappe. Singapore: NUS Press: 2013.

Young, Benjamin. “Arresting Figures.” Grey Room 55 (Spring 2014): 78-115.

Endnotes

[1] Ann Laura Stoler, “The Rot Remains: From Ruins to Ruination,” in Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination, ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 11 (emphasis original).

[2] Grant Evans, The Politics of Ritual and Remembrance: Laos since 1975 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1998).

[3] Oliver Tappe, “National Lieu de Mémoire vs. Multivocal Memories: The Case of Viengxay, Lao PDR,” in Interactions with a Violent Past: Reading Post-Conflict Landscapes in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, eds. Vatthana Pholsena and Oliver Tappe (Singapore: NUS Press, 2013), 71-72.

[4] See several essays in a collected volume by Vatthana Pholsena and Oliver Tappe in Interactions with a Violent Past: Reading Post-Conflict Landscapes in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam (Singapore: NUS Press, 2013). An focused anthropological study of post-Cold War landscapes of Vietnam  and Lao PDR can be found in Heonik Kwon, Ghosts of War in Vietnam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) and Leah Zani, Bomb Children: Life in the Former Battlefields of Laos (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019) respectively.

[5] Allan Sekula, “Artist Statement,” in The Quiet in the Land, Luang Prabang, Laos, eds. France Morin and John Farmer (New York: The Quiet in the Land, Inc., 2009), 163.

[6] Allan Sekula, “The Traffic in Photography,” Art Journal 41, 1 (Spring 1981): 15-25.

[7] Roland Barthes’s demystification of Steichen’s universalist ideology appears in Roland Barthes, “The Great Family of Man,” in Mythologies, trans., Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 2013), 196-199.

[8] Benjamin Young, “Sympathetic Materialism: An Evening with Allan Sekula,” http://straighttovideo.org/2012/02/sympathetic-materialism-an-evening-with-allan-sekula/, accessed November 15, 2017. See also Benjamin Young, “Sympathetic Materialism: Allan Sekula’s Photo-Works, 1972-2000,” PhD Diss, University of California, Berkeley, 2016. 

[9] Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 257.

[10] Allan Sekula, “Artist Statement,” in The Quiet in the Land, 163.

[11] Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 6.

[12] See Jean Langford, Consoling Ghosts: Stories of Medicine and Mourning from Southeast Asians in Exile (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 17.

[13] Bounthanong Xomxayphol, “Kaduk Amelika [‘American Bones’],” in Poi Nok [Freeing Birds] trans., Peter Koret (Vientiane: Laodouangdeuane Publishing House, 2011), 38.

[14] Tappe, “National Lieu de Mémoire,” 46-49. See also, Vatthana Pholsena, “A Social Reading of a Post-Conflict Landscape: Route 9 in Southern Laos,” in Interactions with a Violent Past, 157-185.

[15] Ulrich Baer, “To Give Memory a Place: Contemporary Holocaust Photography and the Landscape Tradition,” in Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 83.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Vandy Rattana, e-mail correspondence, September 6, 2017.

[18] David Teh, Thai Art: Currencies of the Contemporary (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2017), 190-198.