Neak Sophal
NomadiX Art Tour 2024-2025
Patch is a new photographic series developed through research conducted by Sophal in three provinces along the Mekong River in Cambodia: Kampong Cham, Kratie, and Stung Treng. The project emerged from the NomadiX Art Tour, through research activities and workshops with students that focused on environmental and climate change issues.
This series reflects the artist’s personal observations of the surrounding environment and close interactions with local communities. The work brings together documentary photographs of landscapes and portraits of people. Over time, these two elements begin to merge, transforming into new and shifting forms. Figures dissolve, overlap, and reappear, rotating and moving up and down, creating a continuous visual rhythm.
Through this animated transformation, the artist explores the long-standing relationship between nature and people—one shaped by daily contact, dependence, and tension. This relationship is marked by conflict, much of it driven by human activity. Gradually, these interactions leave behind scars—irregular, layered, and persistent. These scars do not fade; they remain etched into the land and memory, enduring as long as the planet itself exists.
