The Free Your Minds festival organised by Meta House purports to expose the connotations of freedom. It was conceived as a means for “triggering a creative dialogue on how to overcome constraints and further develop the country.” Meta House director Nico Mesterharm exonerates his participants and audiences to free themselves from the bondage of constrained thought and activity in favour of an ambiguous end: freedom.
Leang Seckon, one of the artists exhibiting in Global Hybrid: Freedom!, engages with the ambiguity of the concept. His performance work, Shadow of the Heavy Skirt, will be featured as a recorded video in Meta House. The piece features artist Lim Sokchanlina, dancer Charlottle Delaporte and Seckon himself in a three-part performance. The parts occur simultaneously: like Seckon’s collages, the separate elements interact with and inform each other, but do not merge. All three actors in the performance keep to their own space and perform states which continually turn back on themselves.
The absence of a linear narrative means that Shadow of the Heavy Skirt refuses to be read as an instruction on ‘how to be free’. Rather, it is an articulation of states of being, one of which implies itself as more ‘free’ than the others (Charlotte Delaporte’s dance). But the performance, like Seckon’s collage, is rhizomatic. The non-hierarchical existence of these states of being means that the more ‘free’ state is not purported to be the aim, nor the end. The whole performance exists in flux between states of being burdened, restless and free.
Seckon’s philosophy of life is cyclical rather than linear. He believes that we are “always fixing”, that we can be free, but that the shadow will inevitably catch up to us again. Asked to clarify his definition of freedom, he agrees that the best way to think of it is as a temporary thing: “We cannot be free forever. If we are free forever, then we are the crazy person in the room.”
Shadow of the Heavy Skirt is a throwback to Heavy Skirt: one of Seckon’s installation pieces, which has been exhibited in London’s Rossi & Rossi Gallery. “Everything is following [from Heavy Skirt],” he says. The emptying of Boeung Kak Lake was, for Seckon, a second manifestation of the continued influence of Heavy Skirt. “Boeung Kak was my home, and had many activities for my eyes. You see the shadow continues, follows me.”
Seckon has since moved to Siem Reap. “I cannot find it [a home like the one he had in Boeung Kak Lake], but I am trying to fix what happened.” Seckon’s philosophy is practical, but he is as idealistic as he is rational. His idealism exists where it can exist: in Seckon’s mind and in his art. For although man cannot be free forever, art can. “My mind, when I try to make work, is not free. But the work is free. People say artists are free, but we are not. We make work that is free.”
When freedom is unattainable in the long-term, it seems to be interchangeable with relaxation. “They are like brother and sister. Our minds are empty for a while.” But freedom itself is not negated by the presence of its attainable sibling; it remains an idea. “We can find an idea of freedom. This is how we can find a way to be free.”
Seckon always chooses to speak with the pronoun ‘we’ instead of ‘I’. His ideas are not ego-centric; they are communal. He points out the shape of tessellating fish scales, ubiquitous in his work. “I like this image. Everything is connected.” At some point, even the separate elements of collage unify: “It moves together, like the cloud and like the sky: free colour and free brush.”
Shadow of the Heavy Skirt is testimony to Seckon’s philosophy of fundamental unity between his artworks, and between his art and life. Everything moves together, momentarily; the mind can relax in this assured unity of things and life. When the shadow of separateness catches up with us again, we maintain our idea of freedom from the chaos of separate elements and endeavour towards it. Seckon’s work enacts this movement into unity: it invites rather than excludes people, creating communities of thinkers whose beings tessellate together, if only for a moment.
WHO: Leang Seckon
WHAT: Shadow of the Heavy Skirt performance
WHEN: July
WHERE: Meta House, #37 Sothearos Blvd.
WHY: To come together, right now