Ly Vovanna: Ranoch Visited Angkor
Photography can, sometimes, allow you to visualize dreams and facts that never existed. That's what he asked Ly Sovanna for his series, the very first of his photographic proposals and which he entitled Ranoch Visited Angkor. “Ranoch” refers to a period when the light of the moon becomes increasingly weak at night and Ly Sovanna, born in 1979 in the province of Kampong Cham and who grew up in the province of Kampong Thom, relates it to the death of his mother, whom he lost when he was 13 before becoming an orphan the following year. They had both dreamed of going together to visit Angkor Wat, of which she told him: “ Angkor Wat is magnificent and has many sculptures and beautiful Apsaras. For the rest of our lives, if we visit Angkor Wat even once, it will be a great blessing. “. Life not having allowed this visit to take place, the communications professional carried it out using photography.
However, photography was not, until recently, Ly Sovanna's mode of expression. After obtaining a bachelor's degree in information technology in 2003, he was responsible, until 2009, for Catholic media for the National Catholic Social Communications Office of the Catholic Church in Cambodia, as well as a journalist. From 2005 to 2009, he was UCANEWS correspondent in Cambodia. Since 2009, Sovanna has been responsible for information dissemination for the National Catholic Social Communications Office in Cambodia. From 2009 to 2014, he was a board member of SIGNIS ASIA (SIGNIS is the World Catholic Association for Communication). From 2014 to 2017, he was vice-president of SIGNIS ASIA. Although very interested in photography, it was not until 2024 that he joined Mak Remissa's Nimith Art Space where he developed this project in Angkor.
To allow his mother to visit the temples in images, he called on colleagues, women who, alone, pose in the ruins, walk around, contemplate bas-reliefs, fit into the geometry of a door , meet tourists, pose with the characteristic architecture in the background, the three towers of the mountain temple, the only monument to appear on a national flag. And, quite naturally and in perfect harmony with the title of the series, the full moon invites itself on the journey and draws the silhouette of the visitor and that of the majestic ruins. But the image of these young extras is most of the time blurred or moved to avoid making them too present. Photography can reinvent the perception of the world or give us to see what did not exist but it cannot bring back the deceased in our midst. The choice of black and white is part of this desire not to confront us with overly realistic images. They are not ghosts, but not really humans, just presences to dream today of a past that was impossible yesterday.
Christian Caujolle
Exhibition at the Bophana Center from November 21 to December 23, 2024
https://bophana.org/fr
www.photophnompenh.com
