Vegetables in plastic bags - How far can we be pushed to “grow” beyond our own pace & scale? Our food, kids, knowledge, skills, careers… faster, higher, stronger. Whereto leads the narrative of “progress” with “development” as its practice?

[premature cultures] is an artistic and installational translation of how I experienced the process of fresh food cultivation. How are vegetables & fruits grown, processed, distributed and sold in or imported to Cambodia? We are what we eat? But do we know what we exactly eat?

Growing up 4 years of my youth in Kandal province at my grandmother’s house, I was in daily contact with the land, planting and harvesting them over time. During the research on the use of pesticides, my grandmother shared a personal story that I didn’t hear before. She told me that in the late 60s she had a small store where she was also selling liquids that help prevent crops from being eaten by insects. Fighting insects to protect food for people, they used pesticides on the vegetables and fruits. The poison came in a big container and my grandmother would pour smaller amounts of pesticide in bottles, when a farmer came to buy some. One day, the liquid spilled over her body and she quickly ran to the river to wash off as much as she could from her clothes and skin. When she returned to the house, she fainted and was unconscious for a while. She was also 8 months pregnant. The month after, she gave birth to a baby girl, but the little girl kept vomiting all the time. After a week, she also threw up blood and passed away. It was a shock to me that I didn’t know about this before and that she had suffered losing another child. In Khmer Rouge time, she has lost 74 family members, including her oldest son who didn’t return after being listed as “student” and her husband, she heard being beaten to death in the next room. Having lost close people to dictatorial regimes, agricultural systems and social pressure, her personal experiences are what drive me to create awareness for their harmful consequences. I found an old pesticide sprayer in the backyard of my grandmother’s place and needed to be part of my installation, it is a strong reminder of what once happened in my family. Such sprayers were used by hand to exterminate what “harms” our food from being sold. The farmer is harmed by inhaling the toxic particles, the shop seller can be harmed when spilling, the kids playing in the fields can be harmed and the food is still sold in harmful ways to our health, even though the vegetables are shiny and the fruits are intact. In my conversations around my research, I remember some remarks of people that made me more aware: “I never buy vegetables sold in plastic bags or foiled boxes.”, “If the leaves of a vegetable or fruit are eaten by insects, I will get that piece because it was not sprayed by insecticides.”

[premature cultures] wants to breathe out all these stories and wants to be a metaphor for the suffocating circumstances in which our food and its environment are treated. Observing the condensation on the inside of the plastic bags that contain living vegetables and fruits, is an image for me of life being smothered and drained of its juices. The stink that is produced by the rotting process fills the space and entering our nostrils deeply and making us want to take distance from it more and more. Hard to evacuate the smell from the room, people will go out to catch fresh air that they need for breathing. [premature cultures] explores how our industrious world immaturely wants everything faster, higher, stronger beyond its own pace and scale: vegetables, children, knowledge, skills, careers, life…