| Summary: | The Si Phan Don archipelago is a collection of river islands in the lower Mekong River on the border between Laos and Cambodia. International projects, such as the one to make the region the “battery of Southeast Asia”, are at the heart of the economic and bioclimatic challenges of the Himalayan river systems. These projects have effects on the river, its resources, and its landscape. If these multi-scale top-down initiatives are based on a "Western-style" conception of the landscape (Gauché, 2015), is there not a risk of marginalising the cosmology of the Lao Loum ? In a territory where daily life has in some cases been subjected to major constraints due above all to the environment (Sayarath, 2014), how might local residents at the village and supra-village level react to such changes ? As an indirect way of answering the question and based on bibliographic and webographic research, a field survey, and exploratory interviews, the article starts by exploring one of the first forms of common organisation, namely language, by focusing on the meaning of the word ‘landscape’. It then explores the landscape practices of this "plant civilization" (Vidal, 2017) and the three notions of landscape, politics, and time. Following the calendar of the monsoon and relations with the river genies, the supra-village negotiations of the Lao Loum with the river-garden are considered as a form of collective action or the expression of daily life, a deconstruction of moments of the Lao landscape in the "thick present" (Zitouni, 2019).
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