“Through their eyes” “Good morning, people in Cambodia, today is going to be a lovely day with warm temperatures. The highest temperature will be of 88° degrees, while the lowest temperature striking around noon will be of 70° degrees. In this morning update: The Khmer Rouge just invaded our capital with Pol Pot as their leader, many lives with them. "This phrase was said by a Cambodian radio station that broadcasted during the genocide called “ 88.0 Voice of Khmer”. The Cambodian genocide took place in southeast Asia from 1975 to 1979. It started when a communist regime called the Khmer Rouge with Pol Plot as their leader killed over two million people of Cambodia because they wanted to build the perfect agrarian utopia. In other words, they wanted to kill all the smart people so they didn't gain power and could work in the fields. Since I started researching about genocide, propaganda was the thing that sparked my curiosity the most. Propaganda sparked my curiosity because I think it's impressive how does little messages can change a whole individual perspective about something and even turn a whole country against each other “As the agrarian landscape was transformed through physical labor so, too, was the citizenry of Democratic Kampuchea to be mentally and behaviorally transformed” (Paviour). This quote is an example of how propaganda affected the genocide, how they banned the newspapers so the radio was their only way of obtaining information. Propaganda can also tell you a lot about a genocide like who was being attacked, what were the conditions people were living in, the story behind the genocide, and more complex things like why did they did it. In the Cambodian genocide the most common way to spread their idealistics were through songs. Some of the most popular songs were:“They Will Kill You, If You Cry” was a collection of songs gathered from survivors of the Khmer Rouge regime genocide in Cambodia in the '70s, “The killing fields” and “Bravery of the people”. Images were also spread as a form of propaganda in the newspaper like the “Domino theory” photo which explains why the U.S.A didn't want Southeast Asia to become Communist, because they thought that if Vietnam became communist it will spread to Laos, Cambodia, Thailand Burma, India and Bangladesh and soon all Southeast Asia. My whole exhibition is based on propaganda, I wanted to based my project on this because it was one of the things that impacted me the most and made me realize that genocide was so complex, big and tragic. The final project will be an interactive art piece which will include a visually and auditory experience. In this exhibition we want to convey people that genocide is a terrible and real thing, people need to be educated on it, what it is, and how to prevent future genocides, and that people who have been through them are still trying to recover. My name is Andy Vera and I´m an exchange student from Mexico City. What inspired me to do this art piece was a series that I was watching where this girl made a collage based on kids that are in the system (Foster kids) because their parents had problems with their DACA or they were undocumented, and even though they were just images and quotes I think that collage had a voice of its own and it expresed so much in so little, so that really inspired me and I really wanted to do something like that even though I did not know how, where or when. So, when Lori told us about this Genocide project I knew that I wanted to do a big collage, with my ideas and my partners ideas we came up to the conclusion of how we should do three collages in a box each one representing the three groups of a genocide (victims, killers and audience) and showing how different each point of view is from another.
Project Reflection
When I think of this project the aspects that I'm most proud of are two: the first one is the collage that we made representing propaganda. I'm proud of this because I liked how we could take a really complex and diverse topic and narrowed it down to a collage that represent all the aspects of propaganda in a genocide and it speaks for itself. I also liked how for us to express what we wanted to say we didn't need to talk or the audience didn't need to read something, it was all represented with pictures. I'm also proud of the posters I made to advertise the exhibition, I feel this posters where eye-catching and powerful.
If I had one more week to work in this project I would take more time and instead of just reproducing videos from youtube I would make a movie with different video clips. Also, I would like to make like an “instruction poster” so the audience knew what to do. Something I noticed during the exhibition is that the audience was a little confused on our project regarding what to do and if they were allowed to go into the box, some people thought it was just a box and there wasn't anything inside.
Some of the difficulties we ran into with our project was sizing the pictures and when pasting them aligning them so they looked uniform, one thing I would do to avoid this will be to sketch some lines to guide us and then paste them whereas just pasting them. Another difficulty we had was that we kept changing our initial idea and we wanted to change our project instead of sticking to the initial idea, good news we stick with our initial idea although we improve it a little bit. The most important thing I learned from this project was to organize my time, as this project was a really extenze one organizing your time was a key factor. With this project I was also able to learn a lot about genocides from what are the causes of a genocide are to how psychology affects a genocide.