PARIAHS IN YEREVAN – RESEARCH BRIEF
Overview
The Republic of Armenia is a unitary, multi-party, democratic nation-state with a rich cultural heritage. The history of Armenia dates back to ancient times, with the first Armenian state of Urartu established in 860 BC. The Kingdom of Armenia reached its peak under Tigranes the Great in the 1st century BC and became the first state to adopt Christianity officially in 301 AD. The modern Republic of Armenia gained independence in 1991 during the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Today, Armenia is a developing country with a population of approximately 3 million people. Despite facing various challenges, Armenia has maintained a democratic system of governance, with regular elections and a multiparty political landscape. Armenia sits on the margins of Eastern Europe, a land of wine and grapes, mountains and monasteries and wonderful people. Yerevan, the capital city of Armenia, is more than 2800 years old. Founded as Erebuni in 782 BC by King Argishti I of Urartu, it has since grown into one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. Located on the Ararat Plain, Yerevan is located in the southern part of the country, just less than 15 miles away from the border. The city is known as one of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited cities in the history of humanity.
Similarly to Mont-Dauphin, Yerevan is surrounded by beautiful mountains including the Big Ararat, the Small Ararat, Ghegam Ridge and Mount Aragats.
Armenia is, by its very history, a Pariah on the margins of Europe, the old Soviet Union and the Ottoman Empire. The conflicts are still alive as this brief is compiled: The Artsakh region and the Muslim presence in Nagorno-Karabakh is pushing into Armenian territory with churches, cemeteries and historical monuments desecrated daily. 100,000 people are currently displaced and moving into the Armenian mainland under the most perilous conditions. Hence the Artsakh Armenians lost their homes and historical homeland, where they lived for centuries. It represents not just a territorial loss but also a loss of history, culture, and identity deeply rooted in the region.
During the research, the researcher was faced with challenges such as language barriers and trauma, though the women of Armenia that have been the primary target group have opened their doors to Pariahs with incredible generosity, warmth and a sense of accuracy and historical rectitude.
The research in Armenia consists of individual interviews and 2 community sessions to explore the collective and community session of unspoken/forgotten historical memories of marginalised people in Armenia.
CONCLUSIONS
In Armenia, a nation torn apart by uninterrupted genocide, conflict, religious persecution and continued war, the margins are drawn by individuals operating under extreme conditions and within a collective of perilous political reality.
- The significance of a pariah as an individual transmitting historical memory has not borne out of the research in Armenia. The luxury of eccentricity and personal heroism is not available to Armenians and therefore no “protagonist” has emerged from this research.
- The aesthetic, political and economic operations of Armenian needlework creativity are aligned with larger social relations but also had to negate the everyday in order to establish art’s autonomy.
- The aesthetic convergences of opposing and, at times, irreconcilable binaries were taking place against the backdrop of the consolidation of a national representation of Armenia as a modern state with a long national history.
- All Armenia is a chorus of protagonists in never-ending conflict, international interests and shifting political tectonic plates.
- Armenia’s needlework bound to historical memory is marginalised in the sense that it is a contested representational space, a wonderful symbolic battleground for various historical narratives and ideologies, occupying poles between patriotism and consumerism.
- Lace and needlework art appears as an evolutionary convergence of tradition and contemporaneity. Armenians attempt transgenerationally, to reconcile tradition with progressivism and justify national identification in an increasingly globalising world.
- Aesthetically, contemporary art in Armenia has inherited a legacy from the Soviet demand for ethnic representation, which in turn had inherited the orientalist legacy of the Russian Empire. Both of these are present in the work examined in this project.
- The women’s testimonies at the sessions and the needlework presented across many thematic areas (marriage, fertility, death, seasons, harvest, weaponry and more) carries out a meaningful cultural function in national cultural politics and in collective historical memory.
- Marginalisation is conceived as constituted through the lived experience of direct action.
Read the full research here:
Pariahs D2.2 Guide_final
THE LOCAL PARTNER
“Today” Art Initiative (TAI) was founded in 2014. The aim of the organisation is to develop contemporary art activities and create a platform for experimental and innovative art practices and exchanges. TAI provides opportunities to reflect on society’s issues and investigate today’s life problems locally and internationally. Exchanges and residencies aim to foster dialogue between art practitioners on a larger contextual level, such as identity, community, and nationality. Their goals and objectives include the development of the contemporary art scene in Armenia and emphasising cultural activity in rural areas, developing artistic residency programmes with international artists and bringing the new innovative media in the form of collaborative art practices. They also provide educational, cultural, and information exchanges among youth in Armenian rural areas and other countries. TAI is also invested in facilitating youth involvement in social-economical, political and cultural life and helping young people discover their creative potential. To promote the participation of youth in the civic society as active artists/citizens and in various types of social youth activities, the organisation took part in different European youth projects, including Youth in Action and Erasmus+ .
On April of 2015 TAI organized a big international mail-art exhibition in Armenia, which was the first mail-art exhibition in Armenia. “Art for Peace” aimed to promote peace via artworks. Artists from 36 countries (Armenia, Georgia, Turkey, Egypt, France, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Italy, England, Wales, Estonia, Slovakia, Ethiopia, Brazil, Japan, Hong Kong, Bangladesh, USA, Macedonia, Korea, Morocco, Poland, Ukraine, Iran, Serbia..etc ,around 60 artists ) sent their original artworks in different technique to Armenia. The exhibition held in one of the main art institute of Artists Union of Armenia.
Since 2014 we are running artists in residency program in Yerevan and since 2019 in rural areas of Armenia. We aim to make it as exchange too by giving opportunity to local artists to travel another EU countries. In 2019 TAI started a new artists in residency project called Eco Art AiR for developing eco art projects and saving the environment.
