Our senses expand in time, broken by the waves of fleeting truth and understanding. The Black Sea is a body of water that carries encounters. To understand it better, we must learn to move with its current, dissolving our thoughts beneath the surface. The basin of this sea nurtures a community of people and emotions, a web of temporary relationships and connections between them. This happens beyond geography, which is why we can tell the story of the Black Sea right here in Armenia, far from the coast, in the polyphony of Central Europe. Tamta Khalvashi, at Yerevan State University, spoke to us about this very sea of temporality and transience, opening our minds with a leap of imagination. Her narrative gathered various media, times, and histories, testimonies chaotically cast ashore by the strokes of the waves. The movement of the Black Sea is being rediscovered; for decades, it remained merely a tributary of a great, grounded, and eternal culture. It would seem, therefore, that this would be just a partial story, one of many different worlds, but water does not recognize such boundaries. For Marsi Shore, it is precisely boundaries that allow us to build bridges and define, yet their shapes are constantly blurring, and ideas circulate in a disoriented space of mutual influence. By understanding the encounter that flows with the Black Sea, we can construct a shared image, reassemble the world from fragments, and surround it with the living acoustics of the whole. This is the basis of the Dilemma idea, as well as the work of Pogranicze, as Krzysztof Czyżewski explained, invoking the myth of Medea. The craft of storytelling never ends; it must always reach for previously silent, invisible voices, over which the power of the great holds sway. In this way, Medea reclaims her narrative. We now see her as a bridge builder, a healer, a figure beyond the horizon of our expectations and thoughts. The work of creating narratives, new languages, is also the effort of post-colonial theory and practice. In Yerevan, Viktoras Bachmetjevas, Vasile Visotchi, and Hrach Bayadyan expanded our discussion of this perspective, incorporating their local contexts - Lithuanian, Moldovan, and Armenian.Already at the level of language,
colony and empire can be perceived differently - colonization was understood differently by the Greeks, drifting across the Black Sea with the fire of their polis, but also differently we have to think about it in the particular contexts of post-Soviet countries. As Bayadyan said, yesterday's discussion was one of the first postcolonial reflections within the walls of Yerevan State University. In Armenia, this thought practically doesn't exist, it has no trajectory. But to some extent, this is not far from the experiences of the other speakers. The common thread between the experiences of the Iron Curtain countries is the lack of awareness of their own colonization, as if it were happening only outside, in a distant world. Water also returned in yesterday's film screenings. Cristina Jacot's animation, "A Monster Near My Mother's Heart," connected this element with the intimate connection between a child and a mother. The director's narrative colored the drops in various hues and streaks; red coincided with the thunder that followed the rain. Jacot presents the image in its connection with time, and the film becomes a medium of private memory. Similarly, in Anna Dziapshipy's "Self-Portrait Along the Borderline," this dimension combines with a collective archive. The history of family portraits intertwines with the history of nations and war. The director metaphorically crosses the Abkhaz-Georgian border, carrying both of these identities, but she also crosses it in a literal, spatial sense, opening the door of a house built by her grandfather in Abkhazia. This territory, now isolated from the world, becomes a gap within her, a lost paradise that prevents her from becoming whole. In Dziapshipy's film, there are many spaces devoid of people, pure images that tempt one to cross the frame. This is her private exploration, the surface of her imagination, but just as her private body becomes the territory of collective conflict and struggle, so too do these spaces carry something universal. In the distance, the Black Sea flows quietly and peacefully, as if its movement could become a home of a new kind, and there would be no need to protect borders held by force on land.
text: Piotr Szroeder
photos: Narek Dallakyan
