The Queen Mother Library (QML)

A Joint Genocide Museum and Research Institute in Phnom Penh

1) The Library
2) Museum of Memory and Healing
3) Hall of Contemporary Arts
4) School of Genocide, Conflict and Human Rights Studies
5) Research and National Policy Development Center

1) The Library
Currently housed adjacent to their offices in Phnom Penh, DC-Cam’s library holds special significance for Youk and DC-Cam. The current library is an intimate, inviting space, adorned with elegantly framed photos, original Zaha Hadid design drawings for the QML, ancient pottery objects, and even a vintage, functional record player spinning recordings of Cambodian music. The intimacy of DC-Cam’s library belies the vast scope of its holdings, the largest collection of genocide-related materials in Southeast Asia. The QML will provide a new home for the thousands of paper documents, photographs, films, interview transcripts and maps that comprise DC-Cam’s ever-expanding collection. Along with print materials, the library will include a built-in multi-media facility with computer stations, a digital library of archived materials, and access to online journals. Structurally, the library interlocks with a museum and connects, via a bridge, to a proposed school (see below). Connected to other buildings within the broader QML complex, the library provides a visual metaphor for the centrality of research, learning, and reflection to the mission of DC-Cam, and a fitting tribute in the new context to the beloved Queen Mother.

2) Museum of Memory and Healing
A museum will provide exhibition space for Cambodian art and artifacts, from antiquity to the DK period and into modernity and the contemporary era. The museum will house, conserve, and display objects from the Khmer empire, documents, testimonials, and objects associated with the KR regime, and contemporary works of art from emerging and established Cambodian artists. The museum will provide a space for DC-Cam to collaborate with museums and galleries, both within Cambodia around the world, to curate and host exhibitions of genocide related art and artifacts.

3) Hall of Contemporary Arts
An auditorium will provide event space for dance, music, and theatrical performances, and for academic lectures and other presentations related to DC-Cam’s vision of memory, justice, and healing. DC-Cam describes the auditorium as a space in which “a sense of openness prevails…allowing events to use both indoor and outdoor space when weather permits.” Here too, the open design of the auditorium, mediating between inside and outside, speaks the logic of its function: an inviting space for people to come together, share cultural understanding, and strengthen community.

4) School of Genocide, Conflict and Human Rights Studies
The QML integrates expansive spaces for ‘classroom’ learning into the design structure, while more intimate, ‘void spaces’ foster “chance interactions and cultivate an atmosphere of study throughout the complex.” DC-Cam envisions the educational function of the school as one in which future generations will learn the “history of the past and the values of the future.” There, scholars from Cambodia and around the world will collaborate to “craft strategies and policies oriented toward the creation of a future of increased understanding, empathy and justice.”

5) Research and National Policy Development Center
DC-Cam’s extensive archive of original KR documents will be situated, appropriately enough, at the center of the QML design. Here too, the placement of the archive provides a poetic visual metaphor for the centrality of these documents to DC-Cam’s founding mission. DC-Cam describes the archive as a “regional hub” for scholars to “engage in diverse research projects designed to impact policymaking at the national, regional and international levels.” DC-Cam will house its press facility in the proposed Center, building on its legacy as a long-term publisher of books about DK, and of its in-house magazine Searching for the Truth.