We were led by Vigen Galastyan, for some of us this was our first encounter with this city, the movement across the surface just opening up the place. The sound scenography matched the story, in Yerevan it is easy to feel the dynamics of a city that is in constant process, becoming an excavation site, a construction of many times, still searching and writing a story about itself. Yerevan has undergone radical transformations over the decades, changing its colour and light, being reinvented while building Armenia as an independent state. The architectural dreams of the 20th century thought of cities for the people, but introduced chaos into their world, a structure after all deeply encoded in existing space. In Yerevan, the dream of the garden city clashes with the raw modernism of Soviet times, social realism and the myth of cinematography with ancient symbolism, and the spectre of progressive gentrification hangs over the entire space. For years, Yerevan remained on the periphery, located as it was by lines running from Baku or Tbilisi. Today, it combines the universal story of modernism with traces of vernacular architecture, provoking perhaps misleading questions about essence and authenticity. Through these paths we slowly approached our first evening. Café Europa, a poetry meeting with a history of almost 30 years, had gathered a tradition of further voices and sensitivities in Yerevan. Tatev Chakhian's poem ‘Migrant Point’, read in six voices, six different languages, drew the shape of the evening, returning to our questions about Central Europe, identity, otherness, borders and movement amidst these imposed lines. The words of poets, poets from the Caucasus, the Black Sea regions, neighbouring European countries, took on different strengths and melodies, sometimes spinning their story for a long time, and sometimes with the energy of a scream or a fleeting explosion they gathered meaning in a few lines.
text: Piotr Szroeder
photos: Narek Dallakyan i Piotrek Szroeder
