Following the trail of an urban waste canal in Cambodia, we engage with the sensory impressions of discarded material imprints as entangled within the daily lives of the city’s inhabitants. The term “liquid midden,” introduced here, implies the smooth movement and flow of discarded materials in the canal, and is used to explore the entangled visual relationships between discarded supermarket packaging, the canal’s concoction of household chemicals, food scraps, and raw sewage in the combined drainage system of Phnom Penh. Video ethnography, sound recordings, and fieldnotes are used in this interdisciplinary study to convey the elusive sensory impressions of an open-channel sewage disposal system: as entangled in the life of the city as the supermarkets through which the materials have passed.
