Arts for Transformation

A visionary cultural entrepreneur, Phloeun has spearheaded Cambodian Living Arts’ transformation from a grassroots project reviving traditional art forms to a leading cultural organization in Cambodia and the Mekong region. Phloeun joined CLA in 2009 having previously led Artisans Angkor, a social business creating job opportunities for young people in rural areas, while reviving traditional Khmer craftsmanship. 

Born in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge genocide and raised in Montréal, Canada, where his family settled as refugees, Phloeun is proud to have returned to Cambodia to join the movement of arts for healing, social transformation, and economic development. He is passionate about nurturing the next generation of leaders. 

Phloeun serves on the boards of Artisans Angkor and Bophana Audiovisual Resource Center, is a member of Asia Society’s Asia 21 Young Leaders Network, and sits on the Southeast Asia Advisory Committee of the Ministry of Culture of Taiwan.

Cambodian Living Arts believes that the arts are at the heart of a vital society. This has been demonstrated in Cambodia's own recovery and revival after genocide, and is the case in many other post-conflict contexts. 

As Professor Cynthia Schneider writes: 'During moments of tension and conflict [..] cultural diplomacy can emerge as an effective—and sometimes the only viable—means of communication. Creative expression crosses cultures, helping people from diverse backgrounds to find common ground. The Nigerian Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Wole Soyinka aptly observed that "art humanizes while politics demonizes."'

Yet despite this, culture and the arts are rarely taught in the context of politics and policymaking. For this reason, CLA has created a course that takes Cambodia as a living case study to stimulate new perspectives, ideas and vision among participants who take it.

Our project is to reach 500 participants internationally with this course in the next 5 years. 

According to the World Bank, "Conflicts drive 80% of all humanitarian needs and reduce GDP growth by two percentage points per year, on average. Violent conflict has spiked dramatically since 2010, and the fragility landscape is becoming more complex." Even in societies considered to be at peace, there are violations of human dignity by economic and political structures and cultural and social systems.

The example of Cambodia, where the revival of arts and culture has played an essential role in the country’s rebirth after the devastation of the genocide, holds important lessons for our world.

The 'Arts for Transformation' course takes practical experience of CLA, and packages it as a creative learning experience. We know that participants leave the program inspired and empowered to bring lessons learnt from Cambodia into their own professional and personal contexts. 

Our goal is to have 500 people experience this program over the next 5 years. We want to reach people from a diverse range of professional, cultural and socio-economic backgrounds. We will do this by developing an online version and creating an immersive learning lab in Cambodia where we can host students, artists and professionals from around the world.

Our project is to take a curriculum that we have designed and piloted with university students over the past 4 years and adapt it so we can offer:

1. An online version of the Arts for Transformation course, which will include virtual reality and innovative ways to achieve the immersive and collective experience that the physical program offers. 

For this we need to create a partnership with an educational institution who can co-create the course with us, and help to market and promote it.

The course is designed to allow for a wide range of engagement: narration and film, history and theory, performance and experience, site visits, interviews, and a group project. The course provides a platform to explore and debate approaches to reconstruction, revitalization, reconciliation and peacebuilding. It aims to stimulate new reflections, ideas and visions.

2. A year-round Arts for Transformation lab in Cambodia. 

The lab will

• Offer scheduled intensive short-courses, 2-3 times per year
• Offer subsidized places to participants from the global south to experience the lab
• Host groups for tailored immersive learning programs, e.g. university groups, or cultural networks, or social enterprise collectives
• Create work and networking opportunities for artists, cultural practitioners and artivists in Cambodia

The Arts for Transformation course and lab serves people from all around the world seeking new perspectives and practices to enhance their current or future work. It has originally been designed for undergraduate students, but because of its participatory and creative approach, can work for people of diverse experiences, education, age and background. Indeed one of its strengths is having interaction between people from different contexts, and different disciplines.

We particularly want to reach cultural and social practitioners from the Global South through this program, starting by Cambodia, Cambodian diaspora and the Mekong Region. The case study of Cambodia can transform perspectives of people who engage with it, leading to changes in their own professional practices and personal goals. This is highly relevant in the local context, where grassroots actors and civil society are at the forefront of innovation and social development. 

In 2016, Cambodian Living Arts hosted the 'Living Arts in Post Conflict Contexts Forum'. We invited 40 participants, from 20 countries, mainly from the global south, for a 3-day program to exchange experiences and form a network. Typically this kind of forum takes place in the global north, so it was significant that a local NGO like CLA, coordinated the program - which was hosted in Phnom Penh.

During that forum, the late Hilary Ballon, then deputy vice chancellor of NYU Abu Dhabi, who joined the forum as an Advocate - invited Phloeun and CLA to create a seminar course to be piloted at NYUAD the following year. This invitation gave birth to the first edition of "Arts for Transformation: The Case of Cambodia".

For many years, CLA had held the vision that Cambodia's experience of revival, development and transformation through the arts could become a model for other post-conflict countries. So Hilary's invitation to do the work of turning that experience into a format that could be shared with young people - was the perfect opportunity to get started. 

The Arts for Transformation project is important to CLA; it has been a long-held goal to share the case of Cambodia as a model. It also has a personal connection for me. On one hand, it is a chance for me to share a narrative of my country. On another, the challenge of teaching the course allowed me to discover my own passion for teaching and working with young people. I have always mentored and coached younger leaders in Cambodia, but I have really enjoyed the experience of working with students, from different countries around the world. I believe deeply in the power of the arts; when I came back to Cambodia in the 1990s, music, ceremonies and rituals allowed me to connect with my culture and history. It is energizing and inspiring for me to be able to transmit that perspective to young people, and to witness their personal transformation starting during their interaction with CLA and Cambodia. I never thought of myself as a teacher, but I see it is a different way I can contribute. I want to open this opportunity to others in Cambodia, who would not have realized their potential in this way too. 

The Arts for Transformation project is built on 20 years of Cambodian Living Arts' on the ground experience. The content and approach of the learning experience we have created can only come from that experience. Our experiences come from our story, starting from our founder, Arn Chorn Pond. 

Arn was a child when the Khmer Rouge regime took over Cambodia. He survived by playing music, and speaks about how 'music saved his life'. Arn made it to a refugee camp in Thailand, and from there he was adopted by a Christian pastor, Peter Pond, and moved to the USA.

Playing his flute, and sharing his experiences by speaking about them publicly were two key elements of Arn's own healing after he moved to the States. The two tenets of artistic expression and sharing your experiences, are built into the DNA of Cambodian Living Arts. 

When Arn started CLA, his simple mission was to find master artists who had survived the genocide, and enable them to regain dignity and purpose by passing their skills to the young generation. Arn made this happen by enrolling friends and supporters in America to support his vision. 

Since its beginning CLA has been rooted in the local needs of Cambodia, but has connected with people from all over the world - because of the personal, human-centered experience at the center of our story - which others continue to find relevance in today. This is also my own story. And it's my chance to give back. 

My strategy to deal with obstacles is to build partnerships, provide solutions - and take the lead on making them happen. For example, in 2017 we had the world-premier of Bangsokol: A Requiem for Cambodiain Australia. I wanted it to be at Arts Centre Melbourne, the most prestigious venue in the city, part of the Melbourne Festival. 

I had to convince them. Like other venues, they were concerned about the cost of the production and that because of its content, it wouldn't draw a big enough audience for their 2500 seat space. 

I found 3 funding partners to join us. For the audience, I built partnerships with other places in Melbourne - universities and museums, who could co-create contextual programming with us - to stimulate local audience building. 

It was particularly important to me that we have the Cambodian community there. I convinced everyone we could do it. We pushed on the marketing, designing new materials in Khmer language with a relevant aesthetic, we set a system for selling tickets in the community - instead of by the usual box-office system. I arranged transport to bring people from the outer suburbs into the city center.

We made it happen. 

In 2010, I was invited to bring a group of Cambodian artists to perform at Carnegie Hall. From this invitation, grew a more ambitious vision. I wanted to bring the diversity of Cambodian arts and culture to New York on a much bigger scale. That vision became Season of Cambodia Festival, bringing 125 artists from Cambodia to NYC for a 2-month program of performances, films, exhibitions, residencies, talks and workshops - involving 34 partners in the city, during April and May 2013.

Nobody thought a project like this could be possible. For a team from a small, far away country like Cambodia to curate a festival in a city like New York, and to tell our own story - of the intergenerational transmission, the memory, the creativity of contemporary Cambodia - was really something unique. 

I spent two years flying back and forth from Phnom Penh to New York, and we made it happen. That festival changed things for CLA. It made me see our leadership, and led to us initiating the Living Arts in Post Conflict Contexts Forum - and bringing that conversation to Phnom Penh. That in turn led to the birth of the Arts for Transformation program. 

The Arts for Transformation course represents a new way of teaching and learning. It is centered on the expertise and experience of a developing country that experienced one of the worst genocides in history, and continues to be best known around the world for the Khmer Rouge and Angkor Wat. By inviting people from around the world to learn from Cambodia, and its grassroots community of artists, NGOs and changemakers - it challenges assumed political, cultural and social structures of power and knowledge. It shows an alternative narrative of Cambodia, and positions arts an essential component of building just, peaceful and resilient societies. 

CLA is not an educational institution, so for us to develop the program in line with our vision, we need to find a suitable partner, who can:

a) contribute the technical knowledge and professional expertise to transform the program to be available online

b) access the market for people looking to study

We want this course to be experienced by people from a wide range of backgrounds, disciplines, geographies and experiences. Therefore we are seeking a partner that is outside, or on the fringes of, our networks in the arts. 

The second barrier is financial as relates to achieving our goal of having active participation in the programs by people from the global south. In the long term the Arts for Transformation lab will be self-sustaining, and financial contributions from global north participants will subsidize participants from global south, achieving equity for the group. However, in the interim, we need to find funding to support the global south participants. 

The first barrier, we have already been working on by researching and reaching out to universities and other institutions, which we started doing at the end of 2019. However, this has been difficult during the COVID-19 pandemic as many institutions have naturally been preoccupied with adapting to the conditions of the pandemic and are facing internal challenges to their business models. 

We also are participating in networks that introduce us to new communities, for example, the IIAS (International Institute for Asia Studies), which has an innovative program Humanities Across Borders, looking at new pedagogies that align with our own approach, and hosts a biannual conference which we will attend in 2021. 

For the second challenge, we have already made some funding applications to support scholarships, and will continue to do so during 2020. As we will no longer be able to pilot the immersive program in 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we have a longer lead time to seek subsidy. 

We have partnered with NYU Abu Dhabi in creating the course. With NYUAD, we have been able to have 51 young people from 15 countries, as diverse as Colombia, Germany, Bosnia and Egypt experience the program. 

In Cambodia we have partnered with Pannasastra University, to adapt the curriculum for undergraduate students locally in Cambodia. We have also worked with them each time we brought a group from NYUAD and Georgetown (below), to arrange exchange between their students and visiting students overseas. 

We are now working with the Royal University of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh to teach the course to undergraduate arts students. This version of the course is taught in Khmer. A further challenge we face is the need to translate resources and reading materials into Khmer language. 

We also partner with the Lab for Global Performance & Politics, at Georgetown University. We have hosted three cohorts of students from the Lab for a teaching and learning experience in Cambodia. We have also worked with the leadership of the lab to draft a collaborative project to develop the Arts for Transformation curriculum further, including by expanding the program to look at the Mekong Region.

Our business model for the Arts for Transformation lab is a non-profit social enterprise model. We will charge fees to participants who can afford to pay (whether privately or via their institutions e.g. if they are at a university) for the learning experiences that they are receiving, and 'profit' from these fees will be used to subsidize free or discounted places for participants who cannot. 

We will also seek philanthropic support to enable participation from the global south. 

This participation is a core value of our business model. It continues our own history of being part of a leadership network among arts and cultural changemakers in the Mekong Region and the global south. It also is essential to the experience of the program which we have designed, which draws on contributions and sharing from the participants. Since the beginning, the Arts for Transformation, course has been designed with a diverse group of participants in mind (due to the global constituency of NYU Abu Dhabi) and this exchange of experiences and perspectives, and the chance to spend meaningful time together, is one of the key strengths of the program. 

So far we have been able to deliver the program by working with Universities who can pay for the core costs of the experiences we deliver to their students. 

As we wish to expand, and to align the delivery of the program with our core values - particularly regarding inclusion, diversity and equity in participation - we will seek grant and private philanthropic support.

Once we start running the immersive intensive courses in Cambodia, we will have a mix of paying participants and subsidized participants. Initially these subsidies are likely to be achieved through fundraising. Over time (3-5 years) we seek to balance the model so that the paid for places, cover the subsidized places.

We have been hosting student trips to Cambodia for over 10 years, so we understand well the costs and the market for this kind of experience, and know where we need new partnerships and expertise to make this work. 

I am applying for this prize because I really believe in the power of the Arts for Transformation program. I want to bring this course to a much wider audience, and I need partners with specific skills, networks and resources to do so. All of the most successful projects I have achieved have happened because of the partners I have been able to bring together around a vision. This is a new field and a new challenge for me, so I need people to join with me to make it happen.