Cambodia & Art For Kep: Les Villas de Kep

Kep-sur-Mer was once a dream made concrete. Modernist villas rising from the jungle above a silken Gulf. French colonists and Khmer royalty. Prince Sihanouk shooting films in golden light. Then, almost overnight, the rockets came. And the silence that followed lasted decades — a silence inhabited only by ghosts, roots, and the sea.

Emmanuel Pézard in Residency with Art For Kep

It is into this silence that French writer Emmanuel Pézard has stepped. In residence at Knai Bang Chatt through the Art for Kep programme, he has spent months writing from within the very landscape he is reconstructing on the page — a strange loop of memory and invention, where the ruins outside his window become the stage for twelve short stories spanning a century of Cambodian history.

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