Lyno continued in this vein.
Lyno: People used to ask us you are a collective, so what is the collective for? You don’t do any work together.
Audience: (Laughter)
Lyno: Except we do in some sort of way.
Unfortunately, the place very quickly decayed into a slum: an overpopulated hive of squatters where bourgeois art-goers are scared to go, because of the poverty, the crime, the drugs.
Lyno: We are worried by how art is perceived by everyday Cambodians. They were like, what? Are you singing, are you dancing? They are still into celebrity or TV events. We feel like there is a big gap between people’s understanding of how they perceive art. And we wanted to work with everyday Cambodians, simple people, to understand them but also to bring something to them as well in a way that is not too alien and not too strange.
And really, it sounds like Sa Sa's had a transformative effect on the neighbourhood: there's now a beer garden which has begun screening video art, there are film screenings which were meant to be one-night-only, but which the residents have set up tentages for all over again the next night to keep it going...
But the truth is, the White Building itself may not be around much longer. It's the last of the old buildings in the area still standing: everything else has been bulldozed for development, and the government refuses to grant licences to the squatters: they're at risk of eviction every day.
Lyno: So we believe this community may not stay together for very long, But hope that while it does we can continue to engage and the young can continue to express. Because in the end it’s their community. It’s not my community.