Work by Emit Snake-Beings, shared on . Posted in Showcase

The Liquid Supermarket (Midden)

The video is a journey through Boeng Trabaek channel, a sewage and storm water drain which runs through south end of the city of Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Filmed and edited by Dr Emit Snake-Beings over the two months spent crossing ‘stink canal’ on a daily basis, whilst staying in the city January – February 2019.

The ‘liquid supermarket’ displays its wares for all to see, at the southern most part of the city the canal becomes a catchment area for the plastic floating down with the sewage and waste water- the remnants of the city’s numerous lives. Metal cages keep the plastic within the boundaries of the city whilst allowing the water to pass under a road and out into the countryside to the Mekong river. The people living at the southern end of Boeng Trabaek channel gather and sell the many water snails that thrive in the nearby swamps and wetlands. The repetitive sound of the snail seller’s motorbike mounted loud hailer can be heard on the soundtrack of the film, mixed in with other sounds recorded in the streets during the time in Phnom Penh.

Camera & editing: SnakeBeings. Filmed in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, 2019.

Used as the basis of a sensual ethnographic study in following publication: Snake-Beings, E. (2020) The Liquid Midden: A Video Ethnography of Urban Discard in Boeng Trabaek Channel, Cambodia, Visual Anthropology, 33:5, 397-411, Taylor & Francis: UK DOI: 10.1080/08949468.2020.1824969

Made as part of the Creative Ethnography Network (CEN). CEN was founded in 2017 as a way of questioning the role of the filmmaker as principal agent, incorporating ideas from the material turn, in social sciences, where the intra-actions of human and nonhuman actants form a network (or meshwork) of knowing. The starting point for the Creative Ethnography Network accepts that video/film is ‘artificial construction’: an artifice resulting from complex interactions between technologies, sound, light and multiple collaborators within a network of human and non-human agents. Socio-material art based research.

Project link

Tags: , , , , , , ,

    ||    

  • You try your hardest to give people their space, but at moments you know you’re capturing their image in ways they may or may not be okay with. It’s that rocking back and forth between respect and betrayal that I feel like is at the heart of the film.

    Kirsten Johnson

  • So it is my firm belief, that if you want nowadays, to have a clear and distinct communication of your concepts, you have to use synthetic images, no longer words.

    Vilém Flusser

  • Watching a documentary with people hacking their way through some polar wasteland is merely a visual. Actually trying to deal with cold that can literally kill you is quite a different thing.

    Henry Rollins

  •  

    If it’s far away, it’s news, but if it’s close at home, it’s sociology.

    James Reston

  •  

    The task for sociology is to come to the help of the individual. We have to be in service of freedom. It is something we have lost sight of.

    Zygmunt Bauman

  • Photographers learn to interpret photographs in that technical way because they want to understand and use that ‘language’ themselves (just as musicians learn a more technical musical language than the layman needs). Social scientists who want to work with visual materials will have to learn to approach them in this more studious and time-consuming way

    Howard Becker

  • Before I became a film major, I was very heavily into social science, I had done a lot of sociology, anthropology, and I was playing in what I call social psychology, which is sort of an offshoot of anthropology/sociology – looking at a culture as a living organism, why it does what it does.

    George Lucas

  • Give us adequate images. We lack adequate images. Our civilization does not have adequate images. And I think a civilization is doomed or is going to die out like dinosaurs if it doesn’t develop an adequate language for adequate images.

    Werner Herzog

  •  

    Sometimes one picture is equal to 30 pages of discourse, just as there are things images are completely incapable of communicating.

    William S. Burroughs

  • If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you’ve got to find a language. Which goes for film as well as prose, for documentary as well as autobiography. Use the wrong language, and you’re dumb and blind.

    Salman Rushdie

  • We never really know what’s around the corner when we’re filming – what turn a story will take, what a character will do or say to surprise us, how the events in the world will impact our story.

    Barbara Kopple

  •  

    There are dignified stupidities, and there are heroic stupidities, and there is such a thing as stupid stupidities, and that would be a stupid stupidity not to have a camera on board.

    Werner Herzog

  •  

    For any picture, ask yourself what question or questions it might be answering. Since the picture could answer many, questions, we can decide what question we are interested in.

    Howard Becker

  •  

    Visual culture is now the study of how to understand change in a world too enormous to see but vital to imagine.

    Nicholas Mirzoeff

  • I believe that we face incredible obstacles in our attempts to see the world. Everything in our nature tries to deny the world around us; to refabricate it in our own image; to reinvent it for our own benefit. And so, it becomes something of a challenge, a task, to recover (or at least attempt to recover) the real world despite all the impediments to that end.

    Errol Morris

  •  

    Reality changes; in order to represent it, modes of representation must change.

    Bertolt Brecht

  •  

    Reality changes; in order to represent it, modes of representation must change.

    Bertolt Brecht

  •  

    The function of sociology, as of every science, is to reveal that which is hidden.

    Pierre Bourdieu

  •  

    One advantage of photography is that it’s visual and can transcend language.

    Lisa Kristine

Showcase

#Visualsociology

Contact us

     
     
     
    Become a member