Our current Dirt Palace Storefront Window Gallery artist is Marius Keo Marjolin.
Marius Keo Marjolin (they/them) is a mixed Khmerican printmaker and illustrator based in Providence. Originally from Westchester NY, they graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2021 with a BFA in Printmaking. Currently, they are a member of Binch Press, a cooperatively run printshop centering queer and BIPOC artists. Through silkscreen, collage, and mixed media, Keo Marjolin melds DIY forms of image-making with motifs from Khmer classical dance to explore cultural and ecological cycles of transformation.
https://www.mariusmarjolin.com/
https://www.instagram.com/tofu.twink/
https://www.tiktok.com/@tofutwink
Below is a conversation between Marius and author/ cultural critic Anne Elizabeth Moore
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AEM: Why don’t you start by telling me how your Dirt Palace window installation ended up coming together?
Marius: I met up with Xander in January. I had been working on these big paper collage figures—and to define big, a little less than life size. So for me, life-size being five foot three—that's my life size. So comparable in height to me, or a little smaller. Working on them primarily on my apartment floor.
AEM: How big is your apartment?
Marius: Relative to my friends who live in New York, it's fine. It's definitely doable. But I floated all around the house. Like the living room was sometimes my studio. So if you had seen me then I would be on the ground with scraps of paper, all around me, and then a station to paint on paper and then a station to glue with, like, cardboard to protect the rug. And then maybe my cat checking in every now and then and sitting right on the face of the drawing.
The base is a pretty standard drawing paper, and then I had this huge collection of different specialty papers from my time in the printmaking department at RISD. So lots of, I guess, eastern papers, like Kozo or Lokta. Over time, for the most part, [the forms stayed] pretty rigid, just from the layers of paper on top. There were a few areas such as the hands where I backed [the paper] with some board. So the back is a little bit … you know, you don't have to see the back.
AEM: Then how were you actually making the figures?
Marius: I start with a roll out, from this drawing paper roll I have that's a few feet wide. I'll roll out some paper. I’ll start with maybe five feet by three feet worth of paper, and I’ll try to draw the figure to scale as best I can. From there, that initial sketch is going to get chopped up and traced onto watercolor paper, for mostly the hands, the legs, and the mask, or the face.
Or I’ll trace out based on that mock-up, onto the other sheets of decorative paper. Over time, I'll just have, like, a leg hanging in one end of the studio and an arm that I'm working on in the other. At some point they do get pasted together, mostly using nori paste or rice paste.
AEM: The exhibition retells a moment from the Reamker, the Cambodian version of the Sanskrit epic poem, the Ramayana. Was using traditionally Asian-crafted materials important to the process?
Marius: I think it was somewhat part of the process. Something that I was thinking about while working on the pieces was that my grandfather, who's Cambodian, passed away during the beginning of COVID. He was an artist. I remember hearing this story after he passed about how he would draw these monkey-king, Hanuman-esque figures. He would take these red seeds from the yard and embed them into the drawings. I think what I really enjoy about a lot of Asian papers are those little inclusions, such as little strands of Kozo, that tie it back to the natural world in some way.
AEM: Had your grandfather immigrated to the US or was he still living in Cambodia?
Marius: My grandparents immigrated to the US, sometime in the ‘60s I believe. Actually my parents are a lot older than the parents of most people I know who are my age. I call myself the second batch because I'm the product of my dad's second marriage. My dad is a white French man. So my dad is 75 and then my mom is 60-something.
AEM: That’s interesting. I do think that stuff matters. I was just talking to a friend about another mutual friend of ours who was always sort of coming from this weird place, like his point of reference always seemed to be completely different from our point of reference. Anyway, she recently realized that his parents are a full generation older than ours, so while we were getting boozed up and going to shows, he was talking about, like, savings bonds. How did this age gap affect your relationship with your grandparents?
Marius: For the most part, my grandparents were in their ‘80s and ‘90s by the time I was interested in exploring more of my Cambodian heritage, so it became really hard to have these conversations with them. There's also some estrangement in my family that meant that in recent years, I've had less contact with them. And then my mom I would consider maybe a 1.5 generation immigrant. For the most part, she didn't grow up in Cambodia. I don't quite know what age she immigrated to the US.
AEM: She would have been with your grandparents in the late 1960s?
Marius: Yes. She's the youngest of four children. So her experience is even very different from people who stayed in Cambodia for longer and then emigrated. It was also before the Khmer Rouge came into power so that changes things.
AEM: Yeah. The late ‘60s was quite a bit before the wave of Khmer Rouge refugees came to the US in the mid to late ‘70s and early ‘80s, although a lot of people don’t understand that things were hard in Cambodia for quite a few years before the Khmer Rouge. So what was the reason for the immigration?
Marius: My grandfather was a diplomat for the UN, and so they moved to New York.
AEM: Oh interesting. I’ve always been interested in that period of history in the country, because the mid-1950s was Cambodia’s first experience of independence, and culture just flourished. But over the next decade, things got really rough. There was civil war even before the Americans started bombing, which then gave the Khmer Rouge an easy path to power. So do you know if your grandfather had a sense of what was coming, in terms of political strife on the ground? Or did he just get this opportunity to move to New York?
Marius: I'm not actually sure. That's definitely one of the pieces I’m missing. But by the time the Khmer Rouge came into power, there was pretty much no going back. Even now I don't think that most of my family on that side has ever been able to go back to Cambodia, even today.
AEM: Fascinating. So what drew you specifically to the story of the Reamker?
Marius: I think growing up around imagery of these beautiful dancer figures … for example, one of the moments I remember as a child was being at my grandparents’ house and my grandma would play these videotapes of recorded dance performances in technicolor. [I remember] being completely enraptured with those for maybe a few days.
For me, these characters are kind of a way in. The story that I based the piece on, the Southeast Asian retelling of the Ramayana, is very much a story of good and evil and heroes and princesses that need to be saved. But also, there's a lot to the story that a viewer would interpret from intuition. From the way the dancers move, how they embody the monkey, or the ogre. So I am able to take these characters, who are somewhat archetypal, and interpret them in my own way.
AEM: Why did you feel like telling this story, the Khmer version of an ancient Sanskrit narrative, in Providence, in 2023 was important? What ties all those different things together for you?
Marius: I grew up in Westchester, New York in a very predominantly white town. There was an Asian population but most of my friends were Chinese and didn't necessarily share the same traditions as my family. And then for me also being mixed Southeast Asian and white, with a parent who is kind of a 1.5 generation immigrant ... There were a lot of mysteries surrounding that side of my history, meaning the Cambodian side of my family. Once I took initiative with meeting more mixed Asian people starting in college and then investigating my Khmer roots more, I think it's been a driving force for me in my artwork to reconcile this complicated history.
I have this mixed background that in some ways is a product of colonialism, French colonization, and in some ways is a product of how my family on that side survived, coming over here. I’m trying to take those things and transform them into something that I feel like I could hold on to for the future. It's really important for me to find joy in my past, given this complicated history. And to be able to find other inspiration to take from this past when I feel like the predominant narrative in the US is about the Cambodian genocide.
AEM: What would you most like viewers to take away from your installation?
Marius: My predominant audience, I would consider to be the Providence, Cambodian community. Providence has been so pivotal in my coming of age as a contemporary Cambodian person, if you will. I feel like my work is mostly for them. And then I hope that anyone else can look at my installation with curiosity and wonder, Who are these people? Who are these characters? And what do their stances or their poses carry? What kind of narratives can I pull from those things?
AEM: One of the things that I noticed about the way that the shapes hang in the space is that they have this supple quality that reminds me quite a bit of the big leather shadow puppets that are usually attributed to Thailand.
Marius: That’s something that I looked into—not early in the project but somewhere in the middle. In general, recently I've been surrounded by people who are really invested in making puppets. I do have this dream one day of making them move in some way.
I think maybe my primary jumping off point besides the dance costumes would be the Angkor Wat Bayon temple bas relief. I feel like I have been obsessed with it for years. It has this really interesting non-linear perspectival space where you have a row of people interacting and deer and trees but then also above them, there will be these fish. It's this really interesting flattening of space that bridges the water and the sky together. That was part of my inspiration for how I wanted to organize the back wall beyond the figures.
AEM: Oh, right. That makes a ton of sense. What about other Cambodian art forms that might have been more contemporary to when your grandparents and mom left, like the comics and the pop music. Does that stuff interest you at all, or is it too tainted with colonialism?
Marius: Yeah. Actually, I really am fascinated by the Khmer psychedelic rock scene in the 1960s. It really speaks to me as an interesting fusion and embodiment of my own mixed identity.
Also I have an interest in DIY music spaces that started when I was 17. So with Khmer psychedelic rock, There was this drive in me for a while to take the music and try to find a way to visually interpret it. Maybe even like the San Francisco psychedelic rock like posters—what would be equivalent be through a Khmer lens? I think that was sort of a driving force in my early work. But it is something that I think is still in the background. It's definitely something that my grandmother still engages with. There was a while where, during early COVID, my grandmother was staying with my parents and my mom was being driven crazy because she could hear the shrill cries of Khmer psychedelic rock from the living room and was over it.
AEM: The screenprinting scene in Providence would be the place where you would be able to explore that, because the psychedelic poster scene has such a strong tradition here. I mean, psychedelic imagery never really caught on Chicago, because we were just, like, too, you know, get it done. Here’s a chicken, or a puppy, or a brick building, in the middle of the page, and the name of the band and the venue, and it’s 14 screens and beautifully rendered, but a Providence poster for the same show would have, you know, every color. Random organization of space. And like, who knows what's happening, but there's a band name. So you definitely go to the show.
Marius: And sometimes the information is missing!
AEM: Right. Sometimes they just forgot to include the name of the band or the venue. Exploring visuals for the Khmer psychedelic rock scene in Providence makes perfect sense to me.
Let's talk about Cambodian-Americans, especially queer Cambodian-American artists, in the US. I think in terms of national and ethnic and sexual identities, queer Khmericans come into a lot of conflict in US culture, especially in this moment of rising white nationalism. We can look at someone like Anthony Veasna So, an incredibly talented writer who was actually being given the opportunities he deserved in American literary culture, but who maybe wasn’t well supported emotionally before his death. And then we have a whole generation of Cambodian-Americans, queer or not, facing deportation for often specious legal reasons back to a country they don’t remember leaving, a situation that puts gender-queer folks in particular danger.
I guess my question is, what are your thoughts on inhabiting a space—the arts—in which it's hard for people to make a living anyway, plus hard to form or feel rooted in a non-white, non-Western, non-heterosexual, non-cis, identity? What does it mean to you to be making art from a place that many find difficult to survive?
Marius: A lot of the queer Khmerican people in my life are mostly around my age. One person that's been an influence, who I'm lucky to be Instagram mutuals with, is Michael Khuth from Minneapolis, who a few years ago created this zine called Generation Magazine, which [gathered] all these Khmer diasporic stories. There was this photo shoot within that zine of these queer and male classical dancers. It was about this primarily gay male dance troupe in Cambodia. That was just a really striking image that really stuck in my head of people who look kind of like me who are also queer and also part of this culture who are carving out space for themselves.
There's a term I am seeing a lot on Instagram, the Khmer Renaissance, which in my mind refers to this rise of contemporary artists and musicians and writers, who are my age, or maybe a little older, who are coming of age and being able to tell these stories of being Cambodian and American and embodying multiple spaces.
AEM: What seems to me to be unique or exciting about that now is that we no longer have to situate these stories in relationship to mass death under the Khmer Rouge regime. We can start to hear people's experiences for what they were in a less charged way.
Marius: I think there's a lot of desire within the Cambodian community for there to be other narratives. To not only move beyond that point in our history, but I think just to tell other stories. To take charge of that narrative. I think that's really powerful.
AEM: Right. I mean, the Khmer Rouge regime was horrifying, but we can't live in that space forever.
Marius: Yeah.
AEM: One of the things that was amazing to me about spending a lot of time in Cambodia was that, when I would come back to the US, people would sort of say, Oh, wasn't it so sad? It was not. You know, it’s this amazing, vibrant place where people are living lives. They aren’t exclusively defined by something that happened during four years, 40 years ago or whatever.
Marius: I think a lot about the end of the world and dystopias. I've always been a complete junkie for dystopian fiction, ever since I was like 11 or 12, but there's also always been this part of me that wants to reconcile that no matter how awful things get with climate change or with our political system, life is still going to go on. How am I going to keep going on, you know? There is this part of me that in the face of maybe the end of the world, is really just trying to have some radical optimism and cling close to my grassroots community in Providence.
AEM: So tell me about other, maybe more local influences on your work.
Marius: My work prior to this introspective, Khmer-focused body of work was very much about documenting local DIY scenes, both in Providence and where I grew up in Westchester, New York. For me DIY was very much the space where I could, when I was 16 and 17, get away from my complicated relationship with my parents and enter this third space where I was just listening to the music and the lights and people are around me and I could be very much in the moment in the time when it was really hard for me to see what the future held in a positive way. So I'm working on a zine now that's just a compilation of all these gig sketches from Westchester and Providence. When I was between the ages of 18 and 20 I would just go to these little house shows and basement shows, and I would just draw. Wherever I was in this space, probably behind some, six-foot-four person, squished between them and a pole, I would try to draw the performers, or I would draw the people immediately around me, or the washing machine in the corner. Having those kinds of spaces, especially ephemeral spaces, felt really important to me at the time.
I think also because I got involved with that scene after I graduated high school and was just coming back every summer for a while, it kind of felt like discovering this hidden layer to these places I grew up around. Like, there was this basement venue that's been there this entire time and there's exactly one band dating back to the late ‘90s or early 2000s who still performed there. Finding that hidden history was really kind of awesome and revolutionary.
AEM: I wonder, if you don't necessarily have an overly communicative relationship with your parents or your grandparents, and then you have this alternative route to figuring out your Cambodian heritage, which itself is very secretive and complicated, I wonder how much discovering the hidden history or secret story that's been there all along might also just be the way your brain works.
Marius: Absolutely. Yeah. I think especially when I was discovering Khmer psychedelic rock at the start of my time at university that also has a similar feeling of finding this hidden layer that I knew nothing about.
AEM: But the other thing about that is that, at least in Cambodia when I started spending time there, and among Khmer-Americans now, there can be a resistance to aspects of DIY culture, and a preference for a corporate overculture—all because DIY and mutual aid can edge toward communism. Which folks are less excited about when they’ve experienced radical communist regimes like the Khmer Rouge.
Marius: That's definitely something I think about in regards to my parents. It's part of what makes talking about being a leftist kind of difficult with them. So actually on my Dad's side, my grandfather was actually one of the pivotal people involved in the Marshall Plan.
AEM: Oh wow. The American plan to support economies in Western Europe and stop the spread of communism from the East.
Marius: So that's a whole other layer to this French, very WASP side of my family. Like, you were pivotal to this! You set off these dominoes, or something. And for my mom, there's the trauma of not being able to go to this place that her family has a connection to. At least that's what I imagine. We've haven't had many instances where we've been able to talk about that.
AEM: Tell me a little bit about the future. What are you working on now? What are you working on next? And beyond that—what’s the next big step?
Marius: In the short term I'm finishing the zine with all the gig sketches. Beyond that, I have all these different interests in comics and screen printing and painting that, for me, the way I wrap my head around it is by just deciding to divide the year into these chunks. Like, OK, I'm going to draw and collage for three months and now I'm in the phase of the year where I want to make zines for tabling a fest this summer. I want to get into oil painting. All these different things that I have to schedule in my brain.
Something that my mom and I have talked about is planning a trip to Cambodia at some point. In recent years, my mom has been a little more open about talking about her family and her family history in bits and pieces. I think that there's a lot that she doesn't necessarily know, but that she wants to experience with me. Which is really great, to just be able to kind of have this new chapter with my mom.
And then, I think my partner and I are thinking about where we want to move to next.
AEM: Interviews tend to close out on this note of, Oh this subject did this amazing singular thing and let's all celebrate that thing that they did on their own! And absolutely, everyone needs to go see your window and needs to order your new zine when it comes out and check out your previous work. But I want to close this interview by talking about the responsibility of community. What do you need from people to get to where you want to be?
Marius: Recently, I've been having trouble getting funding for a lot of larger projects that I've been interested in. I'm very much in the grant writing cycle and residency application limbo. And in Providence right now, it's really hard to find studio space for a reasonable amount. Ideally I want to be able to conduct bigger projects, maybe on a public arts level. I think especially working on this window, I've been really interested in being able to create more public art and engage with the local community in that way. I think in general, when it comes to my art practice, I really enjoy being in community spaces like working in the print shop. I just become really depressed if I'm mostly just working at home freelancing and illustrating.
AEM: Earlier, when we were talking about how you created this installation for Dirt Palace, I had meant to ask if you ever had the urge to work on a really large scale.
Marius: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, without a doubt. I mean, I think of myself as scrappy and resourceful, so I'll work with what I have. But ultimately I really like to make works that are life-size or larger than life-size.
AEM: Someone else's life-size, maybe?
Marius: Maybe my partner's life-size. She's like six foot three. It would be cool to scale it up just a little bit.
Anne Elizabeth Moore was born in Winner, SD, and lives in the Catskills with her ineffective feline personal assistants, Captain America and Mitakuye “Taku” Oyasin Moore-America, alongside several neighbors of the human, cow, bear, snake, and vegetable variety.
Her 2021 title, Gentrifier: A Memoir, was an NPR Best Book. In 2019, her book on comics creator Julie Doucet, Sweet Little Cunt, won a Will Eisner Comics Industry Award. Her book Body Horror was nominated for a 2017 Lambda Literary Award and a Chicago Review of Books Award, was listed as a 100 Best Book Of All Time on the Political Economy by BookAuthority and named Best Book by the Chicago Public Library. The comics journalism collection Threadbare made the 2016 Tits & Sass list “Best Investigative Reporting on Sex Work.” Cambodian Grrrl received a 2012 Lowell Thomas Award for Travel Journalism. Unmarketable was named Best Book of 2007 by Mother Jones.
Moore has freelanced for The Guardian, Anarchist Review of Books, Salon, Paris Review, The Baffler, Truthout, The Believer, and many others. Her essays “Reimagining the National Border Patrol Museum (and Gift Shop)” and “17 Theses on the Edge” received honorable mentions in Best American Non-Required Reading (2008 and 2010, respectively). “Three Days in Detroit,” an essay in the Baffler, was long-listed for Best American Essays 2018.
