Container Port | Break Pot Sketch
2013
Video, 22’ 46”
(from the 2013 Changwon Asian Arts Festival catalogue)
Filmed over four days, Amy Lee Sanford’s Container Port | Break Pot Sketch (2013) depicts a quiet, solo task, performed among dynamic activity and bustle, in a small, tropical, Asian city.
In Container Port | Break Pot Sketch (2013), an androgynous woman dressed in black sits along a busy road in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and repairs a large, utilitarian, Cambodian clay pot, having deliberately smashed it at the beginning of the video. As she painstakingly glues the shards back together, people pass by in cars, motorbikes, carts and bicycles. Uniformed guards direct vehicles entering the traffic flow, and strolling pedestrians stop to watch. Amid a cacophony of shrill whistles, car and motorbike horns, the clanking of bouncing vehicles, food hawkers’ calls and children playing in the nearby schoolyard, the woman maintains silence while concentrating on her single task throughout. Encounters with onlookers add another dimension to the seated, slow, detailed activity.
