ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the archive as a darkroom of history where what emerges from the developing tray is visions of the past melded to the present through the exercise of historical imagination. Intuition, speculation, audience, interpretation, these are all the stuff of historical imagination, and they come with practice and a certain appetite for risk. This chapter provides connections across space—between how things played out on the ground in Paris and Marseille, in exhibition complexes, and in Phnom Penh. It analyses the way in which the Vat Pnom, a central landmark of Phnom Penh that was landscaped in a particular way in the Protectorate, was replicated to represent Cambodge in Paris at the 1900 exhibition. The chapter considers how the movement of people across space—such as Son Diep and Thiounn, to Paris—forged perceptions of Cambodge's place in the world.
