Kat Sok!

Kat Sok! – 2018

Kat Sok! (Cut your hair!) is a series of staged images created in collaboration with dancer Eric Ellul.

My partner, Eric, is Cambodian on his mother’s side and French on his father’s. In Khmer, a mixed-race person is called a kon kat, literally, a “cut child.” On Sundays, we visit his mother in the ivory tower of her borey, a gated community. She frequently sighs to me, “His hair is too long; why doesn’t he cut it?” I noticed that “to cut” is pronounced kat in Khmer, and “hair” is sok, a sound strikingly close to my own family name. Eric looks like a barang (Westerner). He has pale skin, hazel eyes, and long, silky hair. Girl’s hair. In Cambodia, long hair is associated with artists and marginal figures. “Mauvais genre”, says his mother. Tellingly, after her first son, she desperately wanted a girl; when Eric was born, she dressed him in pink. In Eric’s long hair, I see resistance, irony, and distance. The distance between him and his mother. Between those who fled the country and those who stayed and survived the war. The exiled diaspora and those who return, both bearing invisible scars. Since returning to Cambodia, Eric has had to redefine his skin’s contours, his own identity. He will never live up to the expectations of his “mother-land.” They love each other, yet remain a hair’s breadth apart. In Eric’s story, I see an inverted mirror of my own.

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