Reclaiming cambodian dress and textile practices, identities, and collections under the khmer rouge (1970s-1980s): new approaches to archival materials of conflict
The TEX-KR project investigates the history of textiles and clothing in terms of practices and production during the destructive rise and ruling of the Khmer Rouge (KR) regime (1975-1979) in Cambodia. Working in the fields of history and anthropology associated to textiles, I will do so by exploring the textile collections of the country’s two leading cultural institutions: The National Museum of Cambodia (NMC) and the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum (TSGM). When NMC reopened in 1980 in the aftermath of the dictatorship, most of the staff had disappeared, and two-thirds of its ethnographic collection of silk and dance costumes had been lost to looting and environmental damages. TSGM was established as a memorial site and genocide museum on the secret KR prison site S-21 in Phnom Penh and left with thousands of textile and clothing remains that belonged to the prisoners. Looking at what has been lost and reclaimed in these two archives, as well as visible signs of tears and repairs on artefacts and acquisition histories, will help establish these remaining objects as crucial material embodiments and evidence of Cambodia’s dark heritage. Combining object-based study, archival research, and participatory methodologies, TEX-KR uses textile techniques, objects, and dress practices to provide a sensory material turn on Cambodian genocide studies, an overlooked aspect of scholarship to the present day. I will implement innovative outreach activities incorporating practice and oral history to engage different audiences, including weaving groups in Cambodia and immigrant women communities in Europe to explore the topic of textile making, memory, trauma, and displaced identity. Combining politics, heritage, history, this project is an incentive for memorialisation and transitional justice through textiles with the potential to devise a new research model transferable to other cultures of conflict owning textile collections.