Excerpt: Follow You Home

Archives from the Cambodian-Australian diaspora

Over the years, we have republished parts of long-form writing, from catalogue essays to book chapters. This practice is now formalised as part of our Excerpt series. If you would like to work with us to republish a text, please email us at info@from-the-margins.org.

Installation view of Follow You Home (2026). Photo by Richard Glover Photography. Image courtesy of 16albermarle Project Space.

Would you mind if I followed you home? 

Follow / to understand / to haunt / to come after / proceed / shadow / obey / to continue

How do you connect to a culture so physically far away from you? 

My practice engages and actively builds and contributes to a living archive. I am keeping things alive that were intentionally targeted and systematically erased. How do you find a way home when there are only traces of those connections to your homeland? When the culture you try to attach yourself to was the one that was intentionally eliminated. How do you continue to hold on? Grasping at smoke, reaching for something to hold on to, and finding only fragments. You follow the crumbs that fall into your lap in the form of broken stories, splintered histories, trickles of culture, a vague outline of something you yourself never experienced firsthand. Traditions are improvised despite the separation from the homeland, and as a result emerge makeshift rituals that maintain and sustain heritage. Ghosts and shadows linger - they float, they haunt, they echo. And you mourn the loss of what might have been. Until you consciously confront that loss, the abstractness of the loss remains overbearing. 

Linda Sok, parasol carrier 186.9, 2025 dye, silk, pewter, steel and polyester nylon, 84 x 7 x 3cm. Image courtesy of 16albermarle Project Space.

Linda Sok, flowering moon 164.8, 2025, dye, silk, pewter, steel and polyester nylon, 84 x 7 x 3cm. Image courtesy of 16albermarle Project Space.

You / personal / me / you / family / changes over time
Confronting the archive.
The archive introduced you to a particular way of accessing your history. Often conceived of through the lens of the West and the gaze it places on anything declared as “exotic” or “strange”. This lens is one I adorned myself - a warped and distorted view of what it means to be Cambodian. There were two different narratives emerging, pulling me in different directions. How do I negotiate the oscillating nature of my upbringing, how do I relate to a culture I wasn’t raised in, and in what ways do my Australian and Cambodian upbringings intersect and complicate who I am as a person? I found it difficult to make sense of how to bridge these two distorted narratives - an experience ubiquitous throughout diaspora. Perhaps engaging with the personal is the methodology I could use to recover those lost narratives that might have been suppressed by these archives? What does it mean to speak back to those ghosts, commune with them, to find out what they want?

Installation view of Reincarnations of an altar cloth (2025) by Linda Sok. Photo by Silversalt Photography. Image courtesy of the artist.

Home / where is home? / sanctuary / homeland / how do you find home in a new place?
A continuous journey.
Where do you see home? What do you call home? Who do you call home? Who do you follow? How do you find home? What are your avenues in? What do you do when those stories have been intentionally fragmented, not only by perpetrators that look to suppress culture and revert times to an agrarian society, not by the colonies that possess their own agenda to dominate/control a society, but by the victims that survived their trauma and that then fragment their connections to culture to protect themselves from retraumatising themselves? From hurting too much? Despite these hurdles, there still remains the desire to reconnect these severed ties. The rituals, materials and other tangible acts, rooted in these fragments, anchor us to something bigger than ourselves, and the stories start to fill out. The fragments become less veiled, more legible, more palpable, accessible. An avenue to understanding family, and an appreciation of those past attempts to maintain those connections to home, it opens up the opportunity to consider - what comes after? 

Follow You Home is on view from 4 to 26 September 2026 at Grace Cossington Smith Gallery, New South Wales, Australia. More information here.