Poems and Lullabies of the Post-Nostalgic

Poems and Lullabies of the Post-Nostalgic is a performance and installation that questions the politics of memory and highlights the urgency of remembering endangered cultures threatened by genocides, specifically the Armenian genocide (1915-16). Embodying the figure of a nomadic troubadour, a living museum of culture, I transformed my Armenian ancestors’ poems into improvised songs, critically examining archives and their role in collective memory through theatre and music.

This project can be seen as a feminist act and ancestral collaboration. Starting from the poems written by my great-grand mother - who could never express herself aloud because she was a women - I re-interpreted her words to make them resonate in today's contemporary times.

The installation features a handmade silk dress with the artist’s grandmother’s handwritten poems projected onto it, symbolising the fragility of culture as it passes from generation to generation. My voice, traveling through a four-channel speaker system, mixes with ambient sounds of the Armenian landscape, ancestral instruments and electronic music. Through this process, the project creates new, trans-cultural songs from past poems, ensuring their future survival.

Poems and Lullabies of the Post-Nostalgic has been performed at NOPA sound art festival, in Yerevan, at the opening, on the 4th of October 2024, in the art center "HayArt".
This project has been selected by CTM festival in Berlin for the artistic laboratory "Resynthesising the traditional".