Yerevanian cavities
24 Sep 2020Yerevan, May, 2019
Perceptions are a concatenation of matured experiences, of prejudices, of historical research, of ideas, of illusions.
Every place we visit it's not only cover with this veil of ideas more or less elaborated that little by little wear out once we enter in contact with the forms that decorate, occupied and modifies those spaces; but places are also covered with a second, deeper, veil: every country tell us, through unconscious echoes, a story: every country, in our contemporaneity, devote itself, as if it were a marketing issue, to sell, to promote, it becomes the creator and actor of a very specific narrative, of its own propaganda.
It is not always an easy experience, neither complete, to visit a place, nor is always possible to penetrate in its intimacy.
There are limits: limits that modify those perceptions: once fluid they solidify, they blend, transmutate: we keep visiting a place not only because we like it but because it did not fool us, it seduced us, it was coherent in its vices and virtues, it stimulated us, it disarmed us.
Armenia, the sad and impoverished Armenia, for me represents, to this day, the country that has challenged this reasoning the most: I did not have any local interlocutors, the country, its cities, its messy homogeneity, represented only a scenic background that with the days revealed itself as an invading, annoying, ugly, distressing one.
The almost mythological imaginary was collapsing: carefully crafted and sponsored by the omnipresent and tidily organize diaspora appeared fake.
The county, geographically speaking, is nothing less than a corridor, the small anteroom of a world that is no longer the echo of the European civilizations openly competing with the middle eastern ones, it lies trapped and conditioned between the neo ottoman Turkey and the turkophile and turkophone Azerbaijan; Georgia – the garden of God – emerges over its slender body, and its tight feet create a funnel towards Persia. Yes, Armenia, reminds me of an anteroom, an alley with bricked windows, where tiny drops of light are filtered, an alley covered with dusty, millenarian books, instruments, mesmerizing objects, a mutilated and mistreated place.