 Hi everyone, welcome back to this seminar series, jointly organized by Center for Southeast Asian Studies and Southeast Asian Art Academic Program here at SOAS. My name is Bangga Ardiansah, doctoral student at the Department of History of Art and Archaeology, and I will be sharing the sessions. And before we start this talk today, I want to have a shot out actually to my colleague Bipad Kharjan, that are designing all the posters that we are currently sharing at the Facebook and all the social media here. And to us to share about the news about this webinar. So it is my privilege today to welcome the speakers for today's seminar. Michael Falzer, from Heidelberg University. Michael has academic background in architecture and art history. And between 2009 and 2017 he works in the cluster of excellence. Asia and Europe in a global context, the dynamics of transculturality at the Heidelberg University in Germany. He research about anchor words for his professional requirements. And he is also active as a preservation architects and also World Heritage Consultant for UNESCO and ECOMOS International. His current research and teaching focus on the combined field of global architectural history and cultural heritage studies. And then after visiting professorship across Europe and Asia, he is now teaching as associate professor at the Institute of Art History at Heidelberg University. And he's been keeping busy because he already starts a new research project at the Institute of Architectural History at the Technical University of Munich. I'm investigating the global German colonial project as a global building project around 1900 and as a transcultural heritage today. So Michael, thank you for sharing your research with us today in the seminar. Next, also here with us today is Joanna Wolfos will be the discussion for today's seminars. Joanna is a visiting lecturer in the Southeast Asian Art at SOAS. She specialized in Southeast Asian cultural history with a specific focus on Cambodia. Her recent research explored the interaction between pre-modern and contemporary visual cultures via questions of archives, citation, materiality, and power. This includes writing on contemporary photographic practices and the reuse and digital manipulations of archival images in creating national and individual narratives in Cambodia. So Joanna, good morning, really glad that you can join us today. So for today's talks, it's titled Angkor Wat Cambodia, A Transcultural History of Heritage and it will systematically map out the 12th century temple of Angkor Wat that unfolded within the, sorry, it will systematically map out the 12th century temple of Angkor Wat as a global heritage icon. Michael will present a conceptual connected history of Angkor Wat that unfolded within the trans-cultural interstices of European and Asian projects spanning the colonial, post-colonial nationalist and global era taken from his recently published monograph to volume called Angkor Wat, A Trans-Cultural History of Heritage. The book traces the multiple life of Angkor Wat over the 150 years long period from 860s to the 2010s and presented for the first time a kind of visual anthology of the temple with more than 1400 historic photographs, architectural plans, and also samples of public media. After the presentations from Michael, Johanna will give a response on the topics raised by Michael's on the talks. Okay, so I don't want to drag this any longer, so I guess Michael's screen is yours. Thank you very much for your very kind introduction and thank you Johanna also for joining and commenting critically on my presentation. It's a great pleasure and honor to present results of my research today. I actually before, by preparing this talk today, I had the choice of going into one specific detail and discussing an element within my larger research or going through the whole narrative of my book on these two volumes that it has and giving you an idea of the overall storyline including the overall kind of rich, the rich sources of my visual material that I found and so please don't be, you know, shocked by the amount of slides that I will show you. It's more, you will see at the end that they will all fit together in a sense to create a visual anthology of a 12th century temple in its history of representation, media representation from the 19th to 21st centuries. So this is my overall idea and now I should actually share my screen and I hope it will work. Please tell me if you can hear me and see the slides properly. Yes, the slide is good. Is this okay? Very good. Okay, going into the presentation I want to show you one illustration that's particularly interesting for me and my approach. What you will see, a guardian figures holding their umbrellas and the whole scene is framed in the background by a temple scenario that you would, of course, right away identify as a 12th century architecture from Cambodia, from Angkor and so you would assume that it's one of these moments when official representatives, political representatives from another country come for state visit to Cambodia and are shown the temples in order to give grandeur to the visit. The whole problem is that the Cambodian is missing in the picture in terms of the host is not a Cambodian and I will show you what it is to kind of give you a solution to this illustration. We see now that this photograph has been taken not in Cambodia but has been taken during the International Colonial Exhibition in 1931 in Paris where the whole central part of a 12th century temple called Angkor Wat which you can see as the so called original in the same moment in time had been reconstituted in full scale which is maybe the largest ever made full scale replica of an Asian site an Asian temple ever produced on the European continent. So what you would see here is that you have on 1931 two Angkor Wat's innocence standing on different continents 10,000 kilometers apart from each other. So how do we work with this as an entry to the presentation today? I will just give you one or two slides of a theoretical background to the whole storyline but the topic is related to a transcultural a mode of what cultural heritage could be we have to kind of overcome the old standing classical attributes that we attribute to cultural heritage for example place normally you would say a cultural heritage element like Angkor Wat is precisely embedded in one territorial spot on the planet but on this case slide of 1931 it's a multi-sided configuration for example on the lower on the right side on this chart you see identity so to whom it belong to this temple site in 1931 in these two elements and you would certainly see that the audience of 1931 in Paris would not be the same as let's say a Buddhist monk in 1931 walking through his monastery temple site in Angkor Wat in Cambodia for example one spot here is time that normally we would assume that a cultural heritage element or property is one of long of a permanent stability but in this case the temple site reconstituted in Paris was just on the spot for six months and then disappeared forever because it was dismantled and for example the status normally you would assume that a cultural heritage property is one that has a homogeneous situation in terms of fabric form style and construction but in this case you will see that of course the building in Cambodia is a different stone monolithic element not a monolithic but solid element in relation to an element that is on permanent display in a totally different materiality than it has been so in Paris as its counterpart in Cambodia so you will have kind of destabilize as a starting point your thinking of what cultural heritage the physical built heritage should be so in my book I'm doing a dual approach and of course I'm talking about the material based researcher of the artifact so about architecture, about the building itself but then also question is positioning in the intellectual history of a concept that is called cultural heritage I mean as we all know Angkor Wat built in the 12th century was not meant to be cultural heritage from the start and it still is an active Buddhist originally a Hinduist the cultural heritage regime as we understand it from the European sense it has been appropriated it has been put on the temple in later stages so we would kind of see this configuration in a global connectivity that also relate to the originally European disciplines called art and architectural history archeology, ethnography, etc to reflect on how this original European discipline made their career non-Europe in Cambodia during different periods and time and how these disciplines there might be others of course framed the element into what should be cultural heritage so in the long path we should identify the different operational terms and applied taxonomies that are applied to this as culture, art, heritage as terms like original what is the center, what is the periphery where the object came from where did it migrate and came back maybe and all these elements that you would apply as taxonomies to the disciplines you're working on and then both political and institutional regimes and their actors so giving them a name you will see different actors within my storyline and you can analyze them down in history and say what were their intentions back then you can also go and analyze and identify the applied techniques that are relevant for the storyline for example the physical replication strategies in the 19th and 20th century translocation, restitution simulation, representation all these elements that are relevant and you can then see how the framings on Angkor Wat had been changing through time, they are still dynamic and still developing until today and in the future but that's the only slide that I show you with a lot of text and let us jump into this publication that I have the privilege to present today what you see here are the two covers of the two volumes and there is some interesting critique on it that says Angkor Wat and Volume 1 says Angkor in France but you understand what I want to say because what you have on the cover is a 1931 colonial exhibition and on the right side you see Angkor in Cambodia as a jungle finder and call it a French colonial period who like of World Heritage what it is today and what I want to do of course is not to give you all the chapters and all the results but I want to highlight 7, I want to call them contact zone you know this term of course by Marie-Louise Pret from the 1990s but I want to say that there are moments when Asia and Europe, Cambodia and let's say France Angkor Wat came in contact with time borders and across political regimes and I want to do the structure this in two parts one is on France and one is on Cambodia so let's start the presentation with the storyline the official storyline and it has to be of course questions when we go into what's the origin of a site when it was so called discovered etc has always a starting point in the western narrative of art history and the narrative here is so called Mekong Exploratory Mission that that has been has been then carried out in the 1860s but I want to start with the one text that is really important for us because it was produced by a so called naturalist Henri More but he was commissioned back then by the British Royal Geographic Society traveling to Indochina interestingly and he produced a book that was first published in English and then actually translated into French and it was published here in this text that I can show you and he is explaining his moment of aesthetically discovering the site for the same time for the first moment when he was in Cambodia in 1860 and he said beautiful building this has been in the past how then generate and in ruins it is in the presence and he is already speculating who might have been the architect of it but because he does not know he give us a typical framing of grandeur of importance and says it has to be erected by some Oriental Michelangelo so you see that the framing is giving an architect an artist from Italian Renaissance to give importance to what he sees here and coming to terms gradually on a site that has never been explored by Europeans before and he says this situation is now embedded in a state of barbarism and needs regeneration and this regeneration is then in the next sentence which is rarely quoted in historiography directly related to European conquests and he says that France should possess this land and then re-establish this magnificent jewel of this crown and here we are into colonialism and we are also in the World Heritage Agenda and what James Clifford call the eternal salvage paradigm and this is the starting point you would see that the Mekong exploratory mission made by navigators, botanist, geographers, etc along the Mekong into China they've been searching a trade road into China but as a detour only they stopped at Angkor and took this photograph on the staircase towards Angkor Wat you would see this mail of course narrative of four explorators sitting on the staircase towards Angkor Wat what came out of it is a publication that was delayed and came out in 1871. I show you one illustration on the right side which has been published in this so what do you see here is a kind of continuation of Muo's storyline that the site is in ruins, you see the frame here ruins and of course the local people are sitting there as a kind of frame as a ignorant kind of populist that are not directly related to the spot in the typical religious kind of a moment and so you can see this duality of decay and the glorious site in the background in reality the first photograph ever been produced, had been made by a Scott photographer, Joel called John Thompson in 1867 you can see it on the lower side here the first photograph and what you see here is that site is not as overgrown as this illustration wants to give us that on the left side you see some wooden huts and if you go on the upper left side a photograph that was never published but made on the same moment in time during the exhibition exploratory mission by a French photographer called Emilia Xell you would see that in front of the building there is a full intact Buddhist monastery so actually the storyline would go into a perfectly maintained Buddhist monastery whereas on the right side you would kind of more have the impression of decadence, decay, ruin and the implied storyline of European conquest to recover, to restore and to map out the site one in the typical Bosaar aesthetics back then in France I've been discovering giant watercolors and they called it Bosaar in Paris by Lucien Fournerot who was an important architect back then and he did these watercolors in this typical picturesque exotic exoticized ruin storyline where you would see elements of Angkor standing around in large scale whereas the active Buddhist monks on the spot are very small so you would know what the hierarchy is between archaeology and religious practice back on the spot through the eyes of Bosaar architects and painters so in the next step of course in the moment when Indochina got gradually into possession of the French we know this from the British in India etc you want to have elements of this architecture artifacts in European museums in the center of power and I think this a photograph shows this as on the right side maybe a French explorer it might be Louis de la Porte I will come back to him and might reflect like he is standing leaning on this giant stone thinking how the hell we can bring such an enormous piece of architecture here in the Buddhist ruin tower in the territory of Angkor from the 13th century bring this into France museums which is certainly not possible in this scale and what happens in the first step is that little elements artifacts mobile artifacts, original stone artifacts like statues had been taken out from temples produced and transported as you can see in Louis de la Porte he was an amateur an explorer for the second time amateur in the best sense of the word he has been involved in the first missions to the spot and to try to bring original artifacts into French museums and here on the right side you see one of the first French museum in Compagnie where original component artifacts had been on display so here you see a first moment of translocation of original artifacts but how do you mobilize architecture that is in French and also called immobilie so you assume that architecture is immobile and static on a spot but if you want to mobilize it in a regime like for example colonialism you have to apply a certain technique of translation to make it transportable to make it translatable and the last course has been applied a long time before the 19th century but what I show you here there are different moments when plaster cast techniques have been applied on the upper left side in the moment process of artistic creation of one to one scale like copying humans and then on the right side there is a test field of anthropology ethnography where for example here Oceania people had been produced as plaster casts and put into comparative lines of display in European museums but the same was already on place in museums for architecture here on the lower side you see a rare postcard on the right side you would see the Nikita Samotrake which is still one of the most important original artifacts in the Louvre Museum but on the left side you would see a full scale plaster cast replica of a temple site in present day Turkey so you would see in a certain moment around before 1900 plaster casting was also considered a technique to represent originality and materiality changed during the 20th century and now gradually come back I will come back to this this moment when plaster cast are currently rediscovered so what happens when you want to produce in the Chinese Museum you have to bring it into a specific building the building here has been the Trocadero Palace what you can see on the upper illustration which on the the right side there has been the Musée de Sculpture Comparé so the Museum of Comparative Sculpture where famous architect and art historian or architectural historian had installed in the medium of plaster cast an art historical architectural historical parkour where you would walk from the 12th or 9th, 10th, 12th century French architecture from one period in time from one room to the other in his first room what you see on the lower left side he confronted the moment of a transition of late Roman to early Gothic architecture in Rome in France with what he called formative periods around the globe by for example confronting it with Egyptian artifacts what you see on this catalogue on the right side so already he tried to do kind of a global entangled storyline and architectural history but what was just discovered some years ago is that on the other end of this giant building they had been the Musée Andochine wine installed from the 1880s onwards by this amateur Louis de la Porte and you would see on the left lower left side the kind of parallel making of bringing artifacts or architectural elements being installed in this comparative displays and what he did not only putting little elements as originally kind of scaled replicas but what he also did is to bring architectural elements fantastic montage and bricolage into freestanding architectural objects so you would see how plaster cast in detail are transported into France and then recast and reconstituted into freestanding architectural elements and this has two different strategies on the right hand side what I would call a direct translation physical translation of the western entry gate western entry gate to Angkor Wat as a kind of a section let's say aesthetics on the left side a fantastic Buddhist 13th century architecture being fabricated by little so called authentical let's say full scale plaster cast elements but then poured into a building that has never been produced on the spot so what I want to say you tell you is because we focus on Angkor Wat is here on the left side a publication from 1890s where just by accident discovered that you would actually on the photograph see how a little scaffolding on bamboo sticks was made by for someone going getting up to the pediment and then creating a plaster cast of exactly the scene that you see in the museum it is Krishna killing Kamsa will come to this element and in the 90s some years ago I went back to the temple crawling on this very spot and taking photographs for you to compare what has been cast or eventually replaced and interestingly I found another photograph for this display mode of global architectural history in a sense in the Musée Ando Chinois and in the Musée de Sculpture Comparé what you see on the left side is the last room of the French comparative sculpture museum finally maybe with the son of the guardian sitting here holding his hand in this moment in the mouth of the famous Marseillaise which is one of the most important sculptural achievements in French art and monumental art on the Arc de Triomphe but what's important is that you go on the same spot cross the threshold on the left side on this photograph and then you walk into French Indochina so you see how close French art history and Indochinese representations of architecture came into a contact zone just divided by a threshold and then you walk through to this door and come to the photograph that the room that is depicted here in the photograph on the right side but that was not enough because what I worked out in my book is that this Musée Ando Chinois with thousands of plaster casts became a kind of a repository of architectural elements when important architects responsible for universal and colonial exhibitions went to and asked Delapois to give him this and this element in this column and then they were multiplied into freestanding pavilions because and this is why the first volume of my book is called from plaster cast to exhibition pavilions and what I mean with this can only be short glimpses into the book but here you will see how plaster cast works I found actually the original firm that was multiplying the casts the plaster cast surfaces from Delapois Museum and still being visible in the showroom of the firm still existing in Paris on this elephant scene where the famous Cambodian king of the 12th century was conquering neighbors and you would see that these plaster casts are produced at Infinitum and then merged into a new architecture so I want to remind you of casting the pediment of Angkor Wat because we will see it now on a career in French Universal and Colonial Exhibitions and what a curator of the music in May I will come back to this museum found actually some years ago was exact plaster cast made around 1880s stored in the archive of the music in May today in these plaster cast pavilions in the first step here you would see the Pagoda d'Angkor in the Exposition Universal in Paris of 1889 is that the Angkor Wat is kind of hybridized and just exoticized in a small scale object but at least you would see the pediment that we have been showing you before re-employed by this fantastic representation so if you want to bring Angkor or Angkor Wat or a style quote of this into the French capital it means that you want to bring an object from the colonial territories far away into the center of power in France, in Paris to show it to the public and to be fascinated about what the French endeavor into Indochina had been already gaining knowledge for and then of course researching and bringing what they think benefit to this area it's a kind of visual propaganda in a sense and this continues in another national colonial exhibition for example in Marseille 1906 in a very different mode when you remember these two pavilions in the Louis de la Porte Museum de Chinois with the face towers and here the Angkor Wat pediment and the face towers are merged into another exotic exotic pavilion structure on the left side you see a postcard and this continues until a very crucial moment of 1907 what happens in 1907 is that the territory of Angkor which up to this point belonged to Siam so to today Thailand you would see a map on the left side that exactly shows you the frontier line between the original the already French colonial territory on the right side on Indochina so in Cambodia and on the left side territory which is largely unknown back then by the cartographers already indicating Angkor Wat you would see it here on this what happens in 1907 is that this territory originally belonging to Cambodia a given back from Siam into Cambodia by diplomatic pressure and discussions and that was then of course already French colonial territory and what happens just years after is just by comparing these two maps is that the knowledge the geographic archeological, art historical knowledge on the temple sites on the very same spot had been multiplied for this few years and you would just compare these two maps you would see that now Angkor is totally mapped and all the red dots are temples identified on the territory and this enormous gain of knowledge on the original spot had dramatic consequences for the representation of Angkor back in France and this is the other point when already a general conservator of Angkor had been institutionalized and his name was Jean Croix and he did sketches that I found in the archives in Paris where he really went into details of the tower construction and send it back to France where at the same moment in 1914 an architect called De Laval was responsible for the next Angkor style in the exposition colonial national in March 1922 and you will see now that the fantastic kind of a exoticized fantasy object from the earlier exhibitions now became way more detail way more into scale and the representation here was already almost full scale but that was 1922 of course the exhibition was postponed due to the first world war but it was made in 22 in Marseille and this is a result of it on the lower side and the scaling point is 1931 and now you already have seen the original aerial photograph on this exhibition where for six months France and other colonial powers represented their overseas possessions in full scale or hybridized small scale replica pavilions where Angkor Wat you would now see it on the lower left side was on display along the Avenudi Colony so the French colonies for six months only but now I will come to the point of how it was created because of course as you know Angkor Wat is a 12th century a solid stone temple was not replicated for six months in full stone but it was produced as a visual representation on a wooden interior scaffolding and where these lightweight plaster cast plates had been attached to create the visual experience so coming back to what you have seen in the first slides here now we are seeing maybe 1931 colonial exhibition and the issue what is an original and what is a copy in different perspective because in a sense on both spots in Paris and in Cambodia Angkor Wat is a real element it's physically there, it's experienceable it's touchable and it's reality so how do we treat this in our conception of what an original is, what architecture is what authenticity is and origin and or centers and peripheries are this is a question that I want to see and that I've been investigating in my book in the second part I argue and since these representations in France from the 1880s onwards had created a certain image, a certain imagination, a certain expectation towards grundeur towards the original so what I call in my introduction on the method of translation and back translation is that this impression of authentic of aesthetic quality of the site of Angkor Wat had been reapplied as an aesthetic frame on the so called original back in Cambodia so of course a temple site is a site that is way larger which is a religious until today Buddhist religious site but what I see is that the conception of what cultural heritage should be is created in France and then reapplied on the original and this also this conflict between a religious object and its cultural heritage commodification is an ongoing debate and ongoing conflict until today on the very same spot as you know if you had been in Cambodia so in the second part I will give you some short glimpses into actually what happens on the Cambodian side along my storyline what is first of all important for all explorations is the putting on the map as Muo said coming to terms was a problem to describe the Oriental Michelangelo as the architect here cartographers try to put this Terrain Cognita on the map this is the first strategy of appropriation you have to give it a name you have to give it a space you have to give it a taxonomy and a visual representation and one is the map so on the upper left side you see the first maps produced in the 1870s on the side where you would see that Angkowat here is largely embedded in a territory which is blank because you just don't know what is there and by studying the different archaeological maps for example here around 1900 you would see that step by step photographers would kind of map and put temple sites into relation to each other and create the story of art history on the very spot of course aerial photography was not yet invented and possible technically involved but so the first guide books or first art history books on the side where pure fantastic representations not directly related to what Angkowat would be in the central access from east to west by crossing different gates by embedded into a concentric water system with a bridge and going through the territory to the inner architectural space in a temple site which has been represented here in the next step you kind of give the site a certain publicity so the history of guide books of starting cultural tourism to the spot is very interesting to study on the upper left side it was Jean Koumai the first archaeologist on the spot or the first general conservator of the area to produce the first guide book in I think it was in 1912 and then you would kind of slowly come to aerial photography in the 1920s by vertical photographs and put them on the lower left side put them together and getting a picture of the territory measured distances putting on a map and then creating a parkour a way of how to circulate as a western visitor it's not a God given fact you have to create a parkour and if you go to Angkor you would until today use the grand and petit circuit that has been created for you in the 1920s by the institution that has been created for taking care of the site to research artefacts in the China it was called Française d'Extrême Orient which is still operational today in post colonial period so having an idea of the map you see some discussions on how the protective parameters around the temple site should be created on the left side is this very important moment of 1925-31 when the archaeological parkour had been artificially created and institutionalized so what you cannot maybe see on the map here through the zoom presentation is that there is this precise red line saying what is inside and what is outside what is protected, what is not protected what is explorable and visible by visitors and what is not and this has direct effects for the local population because on the overall territory there are still living monasteries and also little villages which are then of course highly affected by this commodification strategies to tourism until today but what you want to have is a picture perfect temple site so studying the daily and weekly and monthly sketchbooks by Jean Comailles from 1907 onwards shows you that he wants to produce what in the 1930s becomes a picture perfect archaeological site of an originally hinduist building which by then was already Buddhist but what the French want is an archaeological representation of the spot so on the lower left side see the sketches where Jean Comailles was originally mapping out the Monastery on the spot but on the next site in the next moment when they create a little hotel here Bangalow, he's already indicating the view of tourists towards the spot and to appreciate it as an archaeological ruin the monastery has been relocated in around the area here until today so you want to have this archaeological vista that you know from the Forum Romanum in Rome etc so the building history the history to create an archaeological park has been a large chapter in my book and the left photograph here is from the 1960s and you would see that almost every stone that you would walk on today has already been moved once and in some elements you also see that the passageway towards the temple which you see on the left side this is the entry gate in the other direction but it doesn't matter has been dismantled the first concrete and then put on the top so if you walk the temple site today you are on the spot of a 12th century temple of course but critically you're also on the site of an archaeological motivation of the 19th and 20th century so keep this in mind the next time you walk from the temple site but this has been the kind of a colonial let's say post-colonial critique but of course Cambodia becomes independent in 1953 and what happens in this moment interestingly all the teksomis of gondur, of deep history, of origins of the golden age of Angkor had been fused into the official national narrative of independent Cambodia with the king a ruling king and what he's doing is to make it short as a storyline to reinvent himself in the lineage of the Cambodian kings going back to the French colonial-made archaeological park to represent himself as the new king of Angkor of the 20th century you see a publication from the 1950s here where he is wearing a kind of reinvented traditional costumes on the center plus of Angkor Tom dan he's standing of the 13th until 1415th century where he is creating a state ceremony of the mid 20th century in disguise and the storyline of the Cambodian kings of the 12th and 13th century this is a fantastic moment of how colonial teksomis are appropriated for independent nation states you might see this in Egypt or in other countries as well of course and a very interesting moment here you will see the visit of Charles de Gaulle so the big politician, state leader of France coming as a state visit to a formerly colonial side of Le Cambodge now Cambodia and they are doing a sound and light show in front of Angkor Wat where thousands of disguised actors are recreating a glorious medieval period of Angkor Wat you would see a publication here from the 1950s where the leader of the former colonial power sitting next to the king of Cambodia enjoying what French archaeologists had been brought back by architectural reconstruction and restoration and of course you would be reminded in 1966 the same moment of a colonial exhibition of 1931 were the same sound and light representation of grandeur had already been in play but 30 years early in a totally different site and different political regime but Cambodia is also one of the postcolonial nations independent nations in Asia which really created one of the best architectures ever in postcolonial architecture by an architect I will not go into detail in this but what they also do besides the modernist architects in the name of Angkor they are producing their state memorial independence memorial in the stylistic continuation of architecture of course going back to early Cambodian architecture but now as you know in the 1970s 80s and 90s Cambodia is facing a very dramatic moment in its modern history a period of civil war genocide auto genocide occupation and in this role very little research has been done until today about the role of Angkor Angkor what in these changing stories and changing regimes over the country and in my book I will do this I call it competing heritage claims because all of these regimes are appropriating the story of Angkor what for their political purpose in the presence that's why the temple has been largely protected and not being destroyed despite of the warfare that had been happening around so just to show you the different context from French colonial period into independence in the 1970s then the Marxist Maoist Khmer Rouge to Vietnamese occupation in this revolutionary red golden background into independence until today you will see that the stylized silhouette of Angkor what has been appropriated along the way of 150 years and in the Khmer Republic it was a moment of civil war by American backed troops by noel against the French at the earlier see an oak establishment and this is photograph of the refugees hiding in their most secure spot which is the galleries of Angkor what in the Khmer Rouge period when the Maoist ideology migrated into Cambodia and some of the intellectuals being trained in France of course appropriate this Marxist ideology for a highly auto genocidic regime under Pol Pot he is here in the center to establish a terror regime over the country they even produced money with Angkor what but this money was of course never been produced because what the Khmer Rouge wanted to make the story short is to bring Cambodia back into the glorious medieval period by purifying the country from negative western influence and that's why this auto genocidic dramatic auto genocidic happened where the overall Cambodian intelligensia was murdered and killed a very traumatic moment in the history in the very same moment in the 70s and 80s a Cambodian refugees all over the planet here you would see a journal in the US where they create their journals and discuss their traumatic experience and question on the lower right side are 2000 years of Khmer culture to be extinguished Khmer Rouge hand to go over Angkor what and taking out the roots of culture and identity of the Cambodian people in the Vietnamese occupation from over Cambodia in the 1980s the only important regime to acknowledge the Vietnamese occupation was India and to make this short is that as a diplomatical gift of political recognition of the country India through its archaeological regime of the archaeological serve of India was as I want to call it kind of rewarded to restore their prime element of a culture which is Angkor what so you see in the 80s 1980s these publications ongoing restoration efforts by the Indians as a diplomatic return gift I want to say while the Cambodians the Khmer Rouge themselves UN acknowledged recognized exile government and I went through certainly like 50 meters of archives in UNESCO archive in Paris to see how this UN recognized Khmer Rouge people had appropriated the cultural heritage discourse over Angkor to get back power over the country to say well please install us back for the Cambodia because we want to protect the temples a mimicked let's say rhetorics from UNESCO in the 1980s of course but this is a very important moment here and you will see this PR material from the Khmer Rouge in Paris at the same moment when the stamps official stamps of the democratic Khmer Rouge using the same with a smoking factory here in the neorealistic kind of marxistic ideology I will come to the last slides now and I want to say that around 1990 when peace talks had been fostered and finally the Vietnamese left the country the UN installed a helping structure to bring Cambodia back into peace to be again an independent country but this has strong effects on again the reworking of the cultural heritage storyline over Angkor Wat and I have a question whether or rise the question whether this world heritage debate which comes up now I'll show you some slides at the end which is kind of related to the World Heritage World Fair Universal Exhibition Logics which now come back on Angkor Park itself I want to show you here the crucial moment when the General Secretary of UNESCO Federico Mayor here in the center holds a speech of saving Angkor for humanity and asks international community to come to Cambodia to protect the site which is of course a very important moment for Cambodia and one year later the park was listed on World Heritage but in danger in terms of the moment of saying we have to protect it but we know that has to be restored before it comes back to the full perfect list and heritage tourism and this reminds me critically again on the moment when in front of let's say reconstituted Angkor Wat the central element the central person to tell the story is again not a Cambodian but on the upper right side it was actually George the future British King George VI on visit on the colonial exhibition in Paris and here it's a Spanish politicians as the General Director of UNESCO holding the speech to salvage Angkor I know it's a critical debate but I think there's a neocolonial moment in the storyline and this is why I produced an edited volume on this issue it's called the Civilized Cultural Heritage Civilizing Mission where now you know the illustration the eternal salvage paradigm under James Clifford's idea is recycled through different regimes over the spot and I asked whether you would see a map of Angkor Park in 2010 where the different nations Great Britain America USA, France Germany, Italy all the way to China and Indonesia and Japan are installed over the territory of Angkor Park to take care of individual pavilions I want to say and critically how far are we from the storyline of the colonial exhibition in Paris where again nations around the planet represent heritage that did not originally belong to these countries but caring for them representing them appropriating them in the best sense so it is a success story of an international efforts of help but it's another critically had been discussed under the neocolonial regime of UNESCO's endeavor here over the spot and just to continue here the ICC Angkor is the international coordination coming over the territory of Angkor Park you can see here monks on this cover publication of the cover cover of the publication in 2010 to celebrate 15 years of this international help structure and again you would have this Buddhist monks kind of as a picturesque decoration for actually the ICC structure no Buddhist monk on the spot would care about international cooperation of conservation because that's not the regime they're religious people caring for the monasteries and I ask of course critically how far are we now from a collage like this where again ruins and living heritage in terms of caring Buddhist monks has been a visual narrative that has been migrating from the 19th into the 21st century and a book that I produced an amazing heritage an edited volume from 2013 and I come to the last slides here you would see what happens today in a mode of over tourism and over scenario of sound and light shows over the spot for tourism has of course a certain continuation to for example this colonial fair in 1931 another point is important and you remember my first chart when I discussed how dynamic our taxonomies our applied value structures over art and artifacts is what you would see on the upper right side here is a photograph that I took for the exhibition in the museum in Paris in 2013 in that moment the artifacts in the area brought by Delaporte and others had been confronted with the restored plaster casts that survived from the world and colonial exhibitions and now I would say that the secondary source of casts in the colonial period became primary sources of a storyline of collecting and caring of the colonial period and they are placed side by side and it's taxonomically contrasting moment in the changing paradigms over originals and copies and artifacts but that would only be half of the storyline and I just want to show you four slides before I end I promise is of course we could play the bad story of Europeans appropriating things and being the bad guys through periods of time and the bad UNESCO and all this because there has been an appropriation of Angkor Wat in the inner Asian trans-regional moments and I won't just give you two moments there are others which you have to remind is one that already in the 1860 when the territory of Angkor still belong to Siam the replication strategy to represent the peripheral element of culture here in religious patronage had been appropriated to be brought to bring Angkor Wat through the medium of replication into the very center of power which back then was Bangkok and you would see in 1860 and you could still it today I took a photograph here in 2012 a small replica of Angkor Wat in the very royal palace of Bangkok produced here the replica of 1860 so our frame starts also with the Siamese modes of representation of Angkor Wat and it ends and that's interesting in another storyline where a giant Hindu sect in India is planning to say that they want to bring their grandest temple of the Hindus there's a quote from 2012 they're standing at their grandest temple thousands miles away from Cambodia to the homeland of Hinduism by not only replicating Angkor Wat but making it even larger and more grander as a site of Hinduism a narration and this created a large discussion also online etc. I discussed this in my book where for example a Cambodian spokesman said a shameful act to replicate this in India, Angkor Wat is Angkor Wat is unique and he says we won't let anyone confuse the world that there are 2 Angkor Wat well we know today that there are many more than 2 Angkor Wat, there are already 20 Angkor Wat circulating the continents, the regimes the cultural political programs our different disciplines from art history to archaeology etc. So to conclude what I wanted to show you with so many slides I apologize for this but I hope that you could see just by the storyline of all the visual material that this temple of course still is a 12th century Buddhist monastery of regional pilgrimage but it's also been a product of a transcultural trajectory in the name of cultural heritage so we started here with the war in 1860 we continued with the called Francaise extremerion in the 1910 to produce it to make it an archaeological site we go to the representation in the Paris 1931 exhibition we come to the moment when the previous colonial power of France is on visit in the independent Cambodia creating a sound and light show at the front of the original we continue by also not forgetting the non-political voices of the refugees in this very difficult period for Cambodia in the 1970s and 80s spread all over the world we continue by the very moment when Angkor became an element in the specific cultural heritage regime of UNESCO we concluded the issue that it's not only a west-east a Europe-Asian storyline it also continues to be an appropriation storyline also within Asia thank you very much thank you so much Michael for that wonderful talk and so many wonderful images as well that illustrated so many it's just marvellous to see all of that archival work that you've done together in such a wonderful way and I have to also congratulate you on your publication of not one but two volumes on Angkor Wat which I think it makes such an important contribution to our understanding of the last century and a half of the temple's history and I think what your talk today did was really remind us of the dynamism of Angkor Wat as a site moving from this idea of the decaying ruin the symbolic of a degenerate civilisation if we want to think about the late 19th century all the Angkor imagination of the site but something that is dynamic something to be restored and something that changes throughout various contests I mean I thought what might be helpful for those of us in the audience who maybe are less familiar with Cambodian historiography is maybe to sort of bridge the gap very quickly between the 12th century and the late 19th century where your talk really picked up I mean obviously you spoke very much about this idea that Angkor is somehow forgotten abandoned very much implanted in the European imagination through these traditions in the late 19th century which go in tandem with the rise and sort of travel literature and that interest in Europe in sort of reading travel, journals and guides tourism, the colonial exhibitions so on and then moving into then the early 20th century where European scholarship on the temples or Cambodia is very much focused on the temples itself so the EFEO's remit at the broad focus is in Cambodia focuses in on the Angkorian period so this scholarship is very interested in translating the Sanskrit inscription establishing chronology, the temples establishing sort of evolution of style in order to kind of get this kind of names and dates history which I think goes alongside what you were saying about cartography and the importance of the map and I think also the importance of naming naming kings naming temples, getting a sense of chronology as we understand it in Europe was also very important and I think understandable for these scholars for those of us who've been to Angkor there are hundreds of these temples so it kind of makes sense that they are going to be one of the first things that one focuses on but as you said we pointed out with the work that happened in Angkor in terms of the causeway concrete and reinforcing the causeway and he said you're walking not only in the 12th century site you're walking on the 20th century archeological site but also you're walking on a 15th, 16th century site as well and one of the things I think that the early European scholarship on Angkor was actually much less attention was paid to the post Angkor or what we might call the middle period Cambodian history and we know that whilst the royal capital moved south Angkor was still a significant site to varying degrees over this period but certainly kings returned temples were modified to suit Buddhist orientation but Angkor was obviously the key temple in all of this while at the same time the original Hindu elements are largely kept as well so there's something about tolerance there that I find quite interesting as things develop something maybe a kind of question of trans culturalism within Cambodia not only within Asia and then I'm thinking also of sort of Ashley Thompson's work on the middle period particularly thinking about the citation of the four phases of the Bayon that's what I've also worked on so for those of you who may be less familiar the Bayon is a late 12th century Angkorian temple built by the first Buddhist king of Angkor and he happened to be the last breaking of Angkor as well and he composed of these giant face towers each face is looking out at the cardinal directions and you can then see a kind of citation of these face towers or these four faces in various other moments throughout Cambodian history and for those of you who've been to Phnom Pen you see the four faces at the top of the royal palace in Phnom Pen as well and so there's a way in which we're doing history but in a very different way less concerned perhaps with names and dates and maps and those kind of things but certainly interested in referencing Angkor, remembering Angkor interested in those kind of cultural aspects and Angkor what was a pilgrimage site or it certainly had international visitors throughout this middle period and so I think your work kind of I think then contributes as well to our understanding of these aspects of Cambodian history that have been given much less attention or that are now being revealed through scholarly work that kind of aligns with your own work so I'm thinking for example of the archaeological work of Damien Evans and his team with LIDAR which has exposed through kind of looking down into the ground a sense of what the infrastructure would have looked like around the temples a sense of how these temples would have been living spaces and this goes alongside the increasing scholarly interest in the middle period the post Angkorian period as well and I think these are kind of what I see your kind of work your meticulous work that you've done within the archives as looking at bringing all this material together 100 or so years is a work of kind of revealing what has otherwise mechanisms that were otherwise sort of hidden ways in which the temple has been instrumentalized through different moments by different actors for different religious or ideological political purposes and so I see this as part of a kind of larger question of what is being revealed and when and what are privileges that work in the choices of what we look at at the temple sites and I think all of this work really has given us a much deeper understanding of how our ideas how Angkor work has shifted over time how the complexes as I said have been instrumentalized from the Angkorian period through to today as well we must remember that kind of middle period as being quite significant and and I suppose what I'm also really interested in in your work and your talk is the way that we get a sense of all these different historiographies working together and what we might term a kind of colonialist mode of history of practice alongside a Cambodian or an indigenous mode of history of historiography and what we see in the 20th century is how they become really intertwined and we see that with the figure of Sianuk for example who is kind of really referencing Angkor in a way that hadn't been done by kings really before they were citing Angkor there were continuities with Angkor but you can see the influence then of the European scholarship in place that Angkor had in the European imagination Sianuk's kind of representation of Angkor in himself you know as part of that lineage and I suppose you know and I think that's one of these interesting things is this entanglement of different kind of histories and I think you know I was thinking that when I was looking at the subtitles of your two volumes you've got Angkor in France and Angkor in Cambodia but I wondered to what extent I suppose there are complexities between the subtitles high to some extent and I know you go into that in the books but you know there is a way of which I think those become complicated the separation of Angkor in Europe or in Asia and I suppose the other thing that I was thinking about in your talk was the way you work on Angkor in Asia exposes the mechanisms that play the mechanisms the flow between the colonial and the post-colonial context and I suppose thinking about this idea of the ruin or static temple something that can be captured in plaster and through the plaster cast plastered by direct contact with the source it sort of takes something off of the essence and can transport that with something in the sense of kind of what exceeds the boundaries of Angkor what's visible we know that the temples of Angkor are very much bounded spaces from a cosmological point of view they have enclosures and gateways and boundary markers but they are also kind of unbounded in the sense they are enlivened living monuments as well and I think that question of intangible heritage maybe comes into play you showed us lovely 19th century photographs of the monastic community within the Angkor complex and I thought that was a fascinating drawing where you see the eye line from the hotel what's the vista that you're going to get of Angkor watch and how do we approve on that or what needs to be done to change the space and moving those monastic communities was a part of that and I suppose that brings me to then it's very central to us here so as which is question of decolonizing and where does always come into the larger discourses around decolonizing cultural heritage decolonizing art history part of this where are the where are the voices of the dispossessed how can we repossess their voices the local stakeholders, the local actors and I think when I think about what's being made visible the the moment Angkor becomes a world heritage site some of these debates become more visible these debates about how the Angkor Park is used how those communities that live there interact with this now global heritage monument site the real consequences I think for the people that live in that site became more visible so those debates around because there was real consequences for the people that lived on site in terms of how they lived how they worshiped at the temples and we saw that that debate happened much earlier on we don't necessarily wonder whether we hear the voices from those monastic communities in the late 19th century because I'm sure there was debate but where were those voices it seems that the process of the world heritage process made those debates much more visible much more louder and yeah I guess I just now wonder as opposed to what's the next iteration is of the temple this is not a question that we can answer but perhaps for our audience thinking about we saw in your presentation on the kind of way the French particularly but I know you've worked on German practices of displaying and call within their respective museums and institutions we see the dynamics of cultural capital as part of the colonialist project and of course cultural capital as we see is still a potent currency but then so is hard currency itself because we see from the 1920s that impacts how we see Angkor that still has real significant impact on Angkor now I'm thinking about the proposed development for theme park and what does this mean and I think questions about capital commodity commerce all kind of coming to the site as well and is something maybe we have to bear in mind as cultural historians and heritage professionals money as well play in the site so yeah I've talked quite a lot but those were some of the things that came out of your talk as I was listening and you worked more broadly and again I have to thank you for today and congratulate you in your volume but I know we have lots of questions from the audience so I think this is probably a great time to hand back to Angkor and take some questions Thank you very much While collecting the questions I just wanted to add one thing of course the negative for the critical moments is when I compress the storyline into one hour you might think that now I'm into this anti UNESCO discourse and this is also too simple of course but first of all and I try to do this international structure to manage Angkor the Cambodians with their institution called Apsara are part of the discussion so it's not a pure colonial continuity of course now Cambodians themselves but you see that in a sense the independence towards for example resources knowledge, money, technology you mentioned LIDAR I mean these are techniques applied over the side which are so costly that in a sense the old colonial storyline of well we have to do because we have the money we can't train people on the side but when it comes to super technological high resolution scans from aerial photography this is a heritage regime that is in itself always coming from the outside towards a developing country and this is a crucial moment when at the end once I had a local worker from the FAO and he said from the Germans or the British or whatever saying how many decades do we have to be trained by experts from outside to be finally responsible for Angkor and this is an interesting spot where sometimes I say okay I'm maybe part of it I'm writing a book now in English of course and I can say I'm not fluent in Khmer so and my storyline itself is in itself archival sources is in itself a continuation of this colonial paradigm maybe this is reality so I'm really conscious about my limit limitations of my approach because I'm not a Buddhist monk or a Cambodian teacher so I just wanted to add this as a self critique in a way okay thank you so much Michael for very fascinating slides you presented us with a lot of visual visuality that really encourage us to think more about Angkor and also very insightful comments from Joanna about how we should see this image from colonial periods post-colonial periods national agenda and everything I have personal question but I know that we have a lot of questions already in the Q&A box so I just want to bring up some of them we have a very limited time so I don't know if you could go through them but let's start with actually quick question or maybe some basic questions from sorry this should be the most attendee okay so it's about how do you define transcultural I think this question for Michael then because the replica on Paris exhibition in Paris to show Angkor as itself but then it was not a mix with French style and then how did you define the element of transcultural then from that view from the visuals and maybe you can answer that first Michael yeah I could go back to the slide that I had at the beginning but maybe that's I don't know whether this is useful or you find it too difficult it's the I could try to do do you see the my presentation yes do you see this slide now where I show this transcultural mode yes what I want to show physical reality of objects of architects of artifacts but by exactly naming them artifacts we are already applying a terminology that has been primarily first of all it's in English but then also the idea of an artifact is a framed entity by a discipline called art history so what I wanted to show is this trans cultural is that even if the site stays until today a very important or maybe primary most important religious site of veneration in Cambodia on the parallel site it has been created on heritage cultural heritage entity by the very naming by the very terms that had been applied on it so there is a physical reality it's a semantical reality then we have religious practice confronted by practices by for example museology, conservation sciences archeology so different practices overlap over the site so the trans means here that it's not either or it's both at the same time and it can also go beyond times and orders and borders so it can be a museum artifact in Paris and at the same time it can be venerated by believing a kind of a Buddhist pilgrim in the same very moment and even within the French museum or back in the spot so it has been this simultaneous dynamics that are constantly being renegotiated by by changing conceptual frames by different actors by different interest groups by who actually owns Angkor Wat today is a big question and this trans cultural means that it is now a complex conglomeration many different elements that are kind of creating a new reality I mean in a cultural theory in a certain moment it has been called third space it has been it is not only an original Buddhist or let's say Hinduist and then Buddhist site it's not yet only a piece of western disciplines now it's a third element it's a third reality on the spot where different agencies institutes, politik regimes and terminologies overlap and create something that is simply a new reality which needs a new discipline or a new framing and this framing that I propose would have been this trans cultural moment of it I hope I could respond to your question I just want to answer with the question by Kyle Lattiness actually so he actually try to have a I mean probably a concrete disciplinary approach of how then you see your project on Angkor is it can we say that it is art history or is it art history then he would suggest that this is the kind of art history that we should do now in contemporary era it's a good question I was asked this sometimes are you now an art historian or archeologist or architectural historian actually in a certain sense sometimes I just don't know and that's actually one approach to the question of how do we work with disciplines just to know that art history for take art history as an example it has a history in itself it's a discipline that has been created in a moment of when nation building in Europe for example became important universities are created disciplines are created curricula had been displayed set up and the discipline comes with a certain range of terms made operational let's say for example the idea of origin in art history always want to know what has been the earliest let's say the earliest Renaissance building but in the end nobody in the Renaissance thought about being an Renaissance architect that just continued and the periods applied backwards from a discipline called art history created late Renaissance money etc. backwards on objects and I think the same is true for Angkor Wat in a certain moment in this case it's a colonial moment French colonial moment where excellent researchers brought their western knowledge onto the site and created Angkor Wat as the masterpiece in a storyline of art and architecture and it creates also expectations because for example today the largest amount of attention, money maybe also tax money but also money from outside is poured onto this spot whereas maybe hundreds of other sites in all over Cambodia are still in decay which is one a very important temple related more to the Buddhist of course to the later Buddhist period which is not in the very center of the Angkor Park so it's less visited less attention less archaeological investigation maybe more pillage more people going there and taking out artifacts too big on the art market etc etc and also commodification dynamics is related to how we apply this grandeur to these objects so we create Angkor Park as the super masterpiece on world architectural history and of course Siem Reap which is the village next to Angkor becomes the major hotspot of cultural heritage tourism in Asia but it is not necessarily so it has been produced in a sense marketing strategies through different regimes also Sianuk, so this is not colonial post-colonial time was very eager to create a whole heritage parkour with a whole institute and ministry of tourism to make money out of this narrative in post-colonial period and I think all this hangs together so if we talk about Angkor Wat as a trans-cultural objects and heritage and you can bring people from conservation studies, from museum studies epigraphy, Buddhists and religious studies which I'm not, I have to confess that's not my studies bring together and use this site to kind of renegotiate our common understanding on disciplines so I cannot say that this is pure art history it's not pure archaeological history it's certainly western western as I'm Austrian architectural historian then I have to say it and I say it explicitly in the introduction that I will always say this little Viennese Austrian-European art historian and that's my box but I may have to make it explicit and say in the introduction where my limitations are Joanna, any total net for the one also teaching about Southeast Asian History in western I mean I suppose I would just agree with this sense of recognising the, what do we mean by the term art history recognising the history of the discipline itself and where that comes from and the applicability of art history of our concepts I mean I look at late 12th century Bayon and you see so much written about the naturalism and the portraits of the Bayon and you can see the way that Europeans are looking at these moments and saying here's portraiture because it's naturalism and that's what we understand portraiture to be coming from our training so I think there is a sense and certainly I often find that where do I sit in terms of being an art historian on Southeast Asia coming from a background in myself as an undergraduate looking at philosophy in art history and not as a Southeast Asianist particularly where am I coming in so I think it brings into question and I think kind of the trans disciplinary nature of research and how important is to work across disciplines together when we're looking at Bangkok can I add or something on this it was interesting that now as as for example some of course reviews are going through my book and it's interesting very interesting moment for me of course for every researcher that it highly depends it's not only the book that has been reviewed but it's interesting to read the voice of the reviewer because it makes a giant difference to be reviewed or a French archaeologist and the reviews are very different for example one French critique said well you know you're not actually talking about Angkobat it's 19th century history what you're talking about and it's not the 12th century site and I said I would say that in a sense yes but on the other hand the reality that I'm talking about is as strong as a physical original fabric is what a heritage regime is producing out of it today is a second reality that is highly effective because it's also destructive so we have to see that Angkobat is still 21st century site no it's not yet it's not dead archaeology but it's continuing as a living heritage or living entity with all the fabrics and conflicts going over the top on it so this critique was very interesting and critical but that's the nature of it okay so yeah thank you for the response from both of you I want to bring this question of authenticity essence from the art historian just to expand it a little bit further by taking the question from Heidi he sees question to what extent can we assume cast or plaster cast is the essence of Angkor when they edited to emphasize the story of salvage when the cast relief added to or finished by hands or allowed to reflect the effect of decay and here to what extent were those effects allowed to remain in the replicas is there a discernible different pre and post 1907 in relation to the increase mapping that you mentioned before excellent excellent questions I hope that I gave one little paper that I produced as a reading so maybe this could be I don't know whether it was accessible for everyone or if you want to share it again where I discussed this especially the moment of plaster cast so your question is very interesting because even if I remember this slide when I discussed the methodological methodological approach that I have that all the disciplines we apply all the terminologies we use the taxonomies we create are in themselves highly dynamic so it does not mean what is original and not cannot change over time and the plaster cast are a very good example of this because I would say that plaster cast themselves went through an enormous taxonomical or change along their way in the late 19th century as we've been showing you I would say that the plaster cast made and Johanna you were right with the same parallel moment of taking photographs so kind of getting to the original surface photograph is also taking a surface as an image transportable and plaster cast are in a way doing the same as on a three dimensional point of view and I think that when I went through the mission reports by this plaster cast people they thought to go to the original artifact making a copy of it so it's actually a secondary source of the original because of course everyone going to the museum in Paris would not say oh this is original Cambodia he would say oh that's a plaster cast and that's not a problem it represents an original artifact in the storyline of art history so this is what they thought as a secondary source of art in the 19th century you remember the photograph you in the Musici May exhibition in 2013 when the same casts of the late 19th century had been on display again but now they're not only secondary source of art but they became a primary source of colonial collecting so plaster cast today became originals not for representing art but being art themselves because it has been a very important technological achievement to produce art and plaster casts and in the late 19th century just said well you know it's just a technique we applied today we do whole conferences on the rebirth of the value of plaster cast take the I wanted to say South Kensington Museum but the Victorian Albert Museum the whole plaster cast court had been reinvented and restaged because now plaster cast themselves are appreciated as originals in the history of collecting art history, archaeology, conservation whatever you want to call it so the cast show us that our disciplines are in themselves highly dynamic and the values that we apply on artifacts are also highly dynamic okay I want to move a bit to the contemporary presence so the question of heritage I guess because there's a lot of question about heritage on the Q&A box so there will be three questions that I want to put them up together so that you can answer them directly together first of all is from SWATI is preserving cultural heritage confined to western modernity what will be the Khmer notion of heritage and then the next question is from Sokasiang is this interesting to see how Angkor Wat has been internationalized but it should be noted that even within Cambodia the temples, not just Angkor Wat generally have been nationalized turn it into a national heritage I am curious about the conflict such nationalization nationalization may cause conflict to the local inhabitants and considering how such as Angkor is managed today can it be considered living heritage sites today and then the last question is from Max Meyer thank you for the most interesting lectures I have one question about current ownership which parties or communities do you consider the primary owners in a mental spiritual sense and not in material or legal terms of Angkor Wat as cultural heritage Michael thank you very much for these questions the first question was what what would be the Khmer notion over Angkor Wat as an heritage and I think first of all I cannot judge this because this would be I mean rather pretentious but what I want to say is what I saw through my eyes so it's only an interpretation because I cannot speak for Cambodians how they conceive it but what I found really challenging is that touching in a way and it is my observation so don't take it for what it is it's just my interpretation is that for example in doing my investigations on the spot for example in some days I would see Cambodian visitors taking their picnic in front of Angkor Wat on the weekend so it's a site that belongs as we go to a park in London and enjoying the beautiful scenery and of course the beautiful building on the other hand you could also as a Buddhist and venerate venerate Angkor Wat as a Buddhist site and be part of a ceremony even marriage et cetera or and that's the third part you could kind of be part of the heritage regime by visiting it as it should be on a global mode or with a guide explaining this is this scenario and this is this sculpture and this is the 20th century and this is the 15th century so I guess the Khmer notion could be a hybrid of different levels and you can switch and change see it's maybe the same as I'm a Roman Catholic in Vienna so I can visit the church next door as a Christian but I can also visit it as an art historian I can also visit it as a critical person saying that Catholicism is now out and we should kind of destroy churches and we can also so I think the Khmer notion might be a hybrid situation you could be all of them together heritage, consumer religious practitioner joyful family relax picnic person and all together maybe the other question was conflict with inhabitants what I saw in my studies and it might change over time but when the Angkor Park was established and then kind of in the 1990s into 2000 stabilized and perfectly managed etc of course the local regime also Cambodians within Apsarazzo the protection agency where more and more concerned about the local inhabitants within the park today they don't exactly know but maybe 100,000 people living in Angkor Park but by the very name of an archaeological park they are not supposed to be any people because it's archaeological in a period the site is dead and empty and if you look at the first maps on Angkor Park there's no village inscribed it's very hard to find precise markers where they say it's a monastery because that's not the logic of representation on an archaeological map and this continues because in a certain moment in time the Khmer authorities developed a strategy of saying we cannot chase the local inhabitants away from the park because that's where they live maybe for decades maybe for centuries but what we want to do is to help them by being careful with the site this is the positive interpretation the negative presentation is you're not allowed to build concrete foundations in the park because that will destroy the archaeological heritage and in a certain moment in time also houses were demolished by the heritage police saying that they are destructive against archaeological heritage and other people said well this is where we live I want to have a house next to my house because I have a daughter and the daughter has a family and the family has children and we are expending anko park, that's fine for now if you want to have a new house you have to build it outside and this is how conflicts with heritage and inhabitants occur and what they created in the east it was an experiment called runta ek, it was an eco village I treat this in my book as well where they said okay now let's give the local inhabitants an idea of how traditional living in the park should be stilted wooden houses let's recreate them outside of the park and giving them the material to create their houses there of course it didn't work because people do not want to leave their family fabric their relationship near the proximity the walking to the next to the neighbors to the other family members to the next monastery so it was a big failure it was an experiment being brought from outside as an idea of original authentic living heritage applied on the people in the park and then it was a laboratory little test and it was not working out but I don't know what it's now but you see the conflict in it and the last question I guess was the primary owners well I mean if you following the World Heritage Convention you would say that this masterpieces of cultural history belong to humanity so they belong to everyone that's a fine story but on the other hand it has been a conflict over the side with the religious community with the monasteries and with the Buddhist communities that are until today a constant stakeholder within the debates of the international international coordination committee they are not as far as I know maybe they changed when I was doing research yes of course they are Buddhists we need this also as a picturesque framing for our heritage industry of course I mean take it critically but they are not being as far as I know organized as one's voice of let's say Buddhist monasteries within the park to give them an independent important voice maybe it changed and I hope so but I know there had been big conflicts with religious communities maybe the same logic as with the inhabitants is also with the monasteries but again I think it's also a learning process I mean from one generation to the other the first thing of Angkor park was 1992 this heritage endanger label was lifted and now it's let's say a normal world heritage site and I think it's a constant learning process and hopefully both the inhabitants and the religious monasteries within park have now an independent voice to be heard but I cannot I don't know if I could just I know we're running out of time but just very quickly jump in I think to all of those questions I think it comes back to that sense of we talk about the colonial period and the post-colonial period as if suddenly the French Cambodian getting independent suddenly changes the landscape completely and I think you showed at the end of your presentation the echo of the moment in the 90s to the colonial moments as well and I think that then comes into when we talk about I don't want to talk about command notions of heritage I know that there's probably people in the audience that can speak to that much better than me but when we're thinking about ideas of heritage or ideas of nationalisation or how we manage the site or you know I think it all comes back to that entangling of colonialist ideas colonialist, coloniality in terms of a mentality sort of within within the Cambodian context and the way that those kind of become sort of entangled and so it's not easy to separate that out and so there does it is a project I think of thinking about decolonising and I saw Rex May's question there about is trans-culturalism a Eurocentric framework and I think that comes back to thinking about the project of decolonising more broadly and I think as you said Michael one of the first steps is self reflexivity as researchers of where are we coming from and what are our limitations but I think that touches on when we talk about heritage as a term what is Cambodian heritage how has that been sort of changed through the colonial and the ongoing neocolonial encounters but I would certainly say in terms of those living within the Angkorian Angkor Park you talk about their housing and restrictions there but there's also restrictions on how they work within the site so potential restrictions on where the kids can jump in and bathe in a pond does it ruin the view for tourists I spent time in one village where they had their traditional nectar so the animist village sort of a deity animist deity and it had been at one of the temples and that would be where they would go but then they had to move and they had to move that site because they weren't allowed to go and make offerings and do what they wanted to do at the temple site so there was a way in which that kind of museumification of Angkor does kind of try and fix it in quite a static way which has real consequences and the question how much of a voice they actually have as stakeholders and I think one element is also important it's not it would be as I said several times too easy to have these colonial post-colonial neo-colonial okay this is one thing and I think it's at play during UNESCO's debate over there I know that I've been also criticized but this is my standpoint but on the other hand and there is also you could also call it colonial but it's a kind of a self-colonizing element in this because the ruling elites and also actually the never-ending prime minister over Cambodia is actually super happy that UNESCO is doing all this because they're poor money and money and experts and training and houses and investments from China and North Korea South Korea, Thailand over the park and they do all the infrastructure but the problem is that for example I'm not a specialist in performing arts but I know that people doing this and you're doing this as well is that consequences for everything of living arts performative arts which are not directly related to the Angkor storyline so example dance I treated in also my book is saying the Apsara dance has to be like it was and it has been recreated partly artificially for world fairs and it is not meant to be developed in let's say hybridized contemporary interpretations which is actually normal for all dance forms we have in Europe and everywhere we can have Tchaikovsky in a classical ballet scenario we can say now the metro send today thinks that we have to kind of bring in a new element but if you are living in a country which is one of the smallest nations in Asia and the largest archaeological site on the planet you are as a ruling elite rather happy to follow this grandeur line of archaeological heritage whereas you're not as much interested in helping small dance companies to develop their contemporary art scene because that's not bringing money so they're all dying out I think they established transformative arts center by Manuel Iván so it's not only the bad people from outside it's also the bad people from inside because the prime minister is a former Khmerusian he's not interested in any contemporary art practice because that's not his storyline I mean I hope he's not listening but I mean you know what I mean so it continues suffering from this because all the money, all the attention all the moments of all the tourists they are directed into this package but who goes to a contemporary dance evening nobody and that's very sad okay then on that note I should actually end this discussion in the seminar because we are running out of time but thank you both thank you ultimately Michael for presenting the the research for us it's been very fascinating to see all these archival images that you blew up to us today and then discussed it with Joanna and also with the participant today I'm sorry that we cannot cover all of the questions that come up in the Q&A box but hopefully you are also enjoying this seminar today please watch out for our next webinars you can stay tuned with our Facebook page or our web page at the center at SOAS for the informations and for those asking about the slides we will try to make this recording available online in a couple of weeks hopefully thank you so much again for Michael and Joanna thank you very much too and also for Joanna goodbye