Seeds and Sap is a series of performative images conceived and produced in collaboration with the trio of contemporary dancers New Cambodian Artists (NCA). Following my impulse to make them leave the nest of their dance studio, we went into nature, into the night, into the unknown. I chose different “scenes” for their aesthetic dimension, atmosphere, or normality. This dislocation served as a starting point for improvised choreographies, pushing the dancers to reflect on how their bodies occupy space and interact with the environment. In these site-specific performances, I used elements of the NCA universe such as high heels, dresses, and dance poses. I invited them to explore my obsessions: fragmented identity, in-betweenness, and uncanny strangeness. Seeds and Sap has become a tale where the bizarre coexists with the beautiful, the prosaic with the delicate, the grotesque with a form of gravity. This series also reflects this critical "momentum" of the lives of women artists who use their bodies as a work tool: careers for the young, teaching as they get older, but very few models in between. In these images, powerful bodies root like trees, full of sap, of thirst for life, grow torn by contradictory desires.
Leo Sok is a journalist, writer, photographer, and transdisciplinary artist, based in Cambodia since 2015. Her photographic practice took off in 2015 when she joined Studio Image. She participated in the Angkor Photo Festival workshop in 2017. Then, she created Kat Sok! (Cut your hair!) which questions the representation of genres in the Khmer culture. A collaboration with contemporary dancers The New Cambodian Artists led to the series Seeds and Sap. Leo's visual work echoes her intimate quest, exploring the themes of identity, feminity, in-betweenness, memory, and transgenerational heritage. She is embracing her place as an observer of the world that surrounds her, and as an explorer of her inner landscape, still with a lucid and ironic gaze.