THE BREATH- through the sea

Cambodia–Brazil
Video performance, photo-transfer sculpture installation, and digital sketches on photos

10 Series of transfering Photos to the white ciment and wood collecting 
Size: 

4 series of Digital drawing on photography 

size : 60 x 90 cm 
Print: Archival paper, Hahnemuhle photo rag 308g 
Two channels Video installation: 10min10s 

“The sea breathes stories of pain, survival, and transformation.”

This project, The Breath – Through the Sea, is a collaborative video performance and installation developed by Cambodian artist SAO Sreymao with Berlin-based Brazilian science artist Ellen, and videographer Rodrigo Carvalho, together with local artists. It was created during a residency at the Goethe-Institut Salvador-Bahia, Brazil, where we were invited to reflect on shared geographies, colonial legacies, ecological transformations, and their effects on the local environment.

 The Breath – Through the Sea is an exploratory and collaborative research project developed during the residency. Through video performance, photo-sketches, photo-transfer, and sculptural objects, the work reflects on colonial legacies, environmental change, and the layered histories carried by the sea.

As an extension of SAO Sreymao’s ongoing series The Breath, the project uses the gesture of struggling for breath—symbolized by a plastic bag—as a metaphor for survival under modern slavery, ecological destruction, and invisible labor. In Bahia, once a major port of the transatlantic slave trade, the ocean becomes a witness connecting Brazil’s colonial past with Southeast Asia’s plantation economies, including Cambodia.

The photo-transfer installation, layered on ritual wood and concrete, pays tribute to spiritual resistance and sacred landscapes. It asks:

How do we breathe in places shaped by exploitation, masked by beauty, and threatened by crisis, development, and historical trauma?

This project does not seek to answer—
but to listen.
To the sea.
To the silence.
To the breath.