The White Building

The White Building is not white, but it is notorious. At some point it was built to house artists, a kind of low-income, subsidized housing project. Since then, it has adopted the tag "slum" and if you google it, the majority of the articles talk about the prostitution and drug dealing that found its way inside.

It's often used as a symbol of Cambodian poverty, with its graying, dingy exterior, prison-like halls, washing hung out on the deteriorating walls and tin roofs.

However, it is also home to many artists and families. I have heard all sorts of differing things, the good the bad and the ugly. I see it all the time, stretching down Sothearos blvd and just behind Cambodian Living Arts' main office. It certainly looks awful, people milling about and the usual shops on the ground floor.

I'd never been inside, as I never thought it was my place, and I'd heard enough mixed reviews not to have any particular expectations when, as part of the Cambodian Youth Arts Festival, I found myself among a group of people heading there to check out a gallery that had been set up inside.

I did feel strange about being there, even with other barangs, just because you are such an anomaly and I'm pretty sensitive to energy like that. Despite how helpful the guys chilling in the stairwell -- just sitting, in the dark -- were in directing us to the second gallery, or the residents watching you go by, it did feel like intruding.

The galleries themselves were fascinating -- one was in clearly a schoolroom, where they had classes in everything from ABCs to Yoga, and had set up about ten small TVs, each playing a tape following one resident and letting them discuss their relationship to the building. They were subtitled in English, and that was interesting.

Then the second was much more of a traditional gallery, young artists from the building -- photography, painting, collage, music and video, and a young man working on the spot -- drizzling paint into a Styrofoam box filled with water and passing a sheet of paper in the water to pick up streaks of paint. All the materials used were apparently readily available in the building.

The apartments I saw were cozy and well furnished, and the hallways were filled with young children, who shouted "hello" as loudly as they could and touched my hands as I passed. They loved the exhibits, crowding around the TVs and giggling, or hovering, fascinated, as the artist working with the paint, water, and paper.

I can't say I made any judgments or learned it to actually be one thing or the other. As with many things, I think the truth is always more complicated than the words spoken about it. It was clearly a community, clearly desperately poor but still going on, the kids still kids. It was precisely what it was, and nothing else.

I'm glad I got to see it.