Project type
Audiovisual performance, immersive performance, video projection, musical composition and improvisation, Saz with electroacoustic, voice, Armenian modal singing, poetical text
Programmed at
La Générale, Paris, 2025 Haus der Kulturen der Welt (AL), Silenced Voices, Unbroken Spirit, curated by Çiğdem Çağlayan, april 2025
NOPA sound art festival, (AM), october 2024
Dutch Design Week, (NL), october 2024
Date
started in 2023 – ongoing.
Links
NOPA sound art festival, HKW, La Générale, CTM artistic laboratory
In collaboration with
Yevkiné Diarian, my great-grand mother
After finding a notebook of poems written in the 1930s by my female ancestor, Yevkiné Diarian, survivor of the Armenian genocide, I felt a profound desire to sing these once-silent words.
The project explores voice, music and the fluidity of memory as means to let a threatened, intimate archive survive. Embodying the figure of a contemporary mystical nomadic troubadour (Ashugh), I use the Saz with electroacoustic technologies.
Poems and Lullabies of the Post-Nostalgic questions the politics of memory and highlights the urgency of remembering endangered cultures threatened by genocides. Inspired by the disappearing tradition of Armenian modal singing, my voice reactivates inherited cryptographic poems to reflects on the importance of personal archives in collective resistance. Voices mix with ambient sounds of the Armenian landscape, ancestral instruments (Saz) and electronic music. Resisting oblivion, the work transforms inherited poems into new, trans-cultural songs, allowing them to resonate beyond silence.
Embodying the figure of a contemporary mystical nomadic troubadour (Ashugh), I use the Saz with electroacoustic technologies. Sounds drive the listener attention’s to what is usually ignored —the resonance spectrum of the note and its unexpected harmonies. The music revives what is almost forgotten — the hollows, the latent presence. The composition plays with hypnosis through repetitive melodic elements inspired by the minimalist pentatonic modes of oral music.
Poems and Lullabies of the Post-Nostalgic is not fixed, but rather fluid, such as oral memory is, evolving in its long term development. Starting from the desire to give a life to the poems of my ancestor, I gathered a community of resistance, thought to develop solidarity with diverse oppressed communities – just like nomadic troubadours narrate intimate stories to address collective traumas and broader philosophical issues. The music itself is in evolution, shaped by the different encounters and improvisation circles that I am organising with musicians.
The project inscribes itself in time and memory, constituted from variations and positive feedback loop. It adresses these notions both philosophically and experimentally.
Poems and Lullabies of the Post-Nostalgic opens up a transgenerational dialogue through the lineage of women, in a feminist perspective.
Lullabies is not only very genesis of music in human history at the core of oral memory. It doesn’t merely refer to calm songs, portals to dreams, passing on to children the struggle of their ancestors. Singing a lullaby can be part of an act of resistance, as it creates conditions for rest, listening, daydreaming and healing.
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