My Sisters Sleep in Battambang

This ongoing exploration traces memory and loss across the landscapes that hold what remains. On my first journey to Cambodia alone, I search for the resting places of my relatives, uncertain, like so many Cambodians, where families were lost during the genocide under the Khmer Rouge. Guided by my mother’s memoir, Survival During and After Khmer Rouge, I met with monks in Moung Roussei, a district in Battambang, where my mother’s sisters are most likely buried, and I will return in 2026 to trace these sites with them. This journey is also only my second encounter with surviving family, and the work unfolds through these fragile, newly forming connections, exploring how memory and presence ripple across people and place. Rivers, fields, forests, and skies bear witness, while documentary images, experimental anthotypes, and archival fragments weave together past and present, transforming the act of searching into a meditation on family, memory, and the traces that endure across generations and land.