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THE WHITE BUILDING: CREATIVE RESISTANCE AND THE (RE)PRODUCTION OF SPACE

Version 2 2024-06-04, 15:40
Version 1 2023-03-01, 21:28
journal contribution
posted on 2023-03-01, 21:28 authored by Martin PotterMartin Potter, Jonathon Louth
The White Building was an apartment building in central Phnom Penh built in 1963 as part of a post- independence modernist vision of a cultural complex incorporating social housing. In 1970, civil war began and in 1975 the Khmer Rouge seized power. Phnom Penh was evacuated, and an estimated 90% of Cambodia’s artists were killed.1 After the fall of the Khmer Rouge in 1979, the intervening Vietnamese-backed government sought to support the re-building of Khmer culture and repopulate the Building through the provision of low-cost housing to the few surviving artists. In the period between 1979 and 2017 a complex community emerged, while the Building increasingly fell into disrepair. Many residents were artists, teachers and small business owners, however the community was often disparaged by government and segments of the media as a slum, populated by criminals and sex workers.2 From the mid-2000s, the Building was under constant threat of demolition by developers backed by the Cambodian government, and the community were at risk of forced eviction replicating similar land-grabbing episodes occurring across Phnom Penh as part of a violent neoliberal spatial reckoning.3 In June 2017 the White Building was demolished. Utilising a Lefebvrian lens, we position the White Building as a social product within and co- constituting a temporal space of emergent resistance. Throughout its history we show that the Building was a space of art and alternatives, however from 2008, a renewed focus on art and storytelling programs demonstrated pluralistic modes of struggle by the community, inclusive of attempts to preserve the Building and the community. These programs fostered a rearticulated sense of place and belonging.4 Emergent forms of creative resistance were constituted by the community’s (re)connection to the Building. Dominant discursive acts of the more powerful, driven by profit- driven development opportunities, were challenged through the expression of the ‘lived’ and the elevation of everyday life. This re-emergence of a social space tied to a sense of emotional belonging (re)produced counter-acting voices that offered a momentary space of resistance and opportunity.

History

Alternative title

THE WHITE BUILDING: CREATIVE RESISTANCE AND THE (RE)PRODUCTION OF SPACE

Journal

AMPS Proceedings Series 29.1

Volume

29.1

Article number

25

Pagination

230-240

Location

Kent, UK

ISSN

2398-9467

eISSN

2398-9467

Language

English

Related work

www.whitebuilding.org

Issue

(IN)TANGIBLE HERITAGE(S): Design, culture and technology – past, present, and future

Publisher

AMPS

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