The last voices before leaving Lori were connected to the future of Dilemma, asking about the formula and language of the programme, gathering the different perspectives of the project participants - their starting points coming from completely different places, after all. In Yerevan, we were already freely looking forward to the coming evening, the last night of our time together. We arrived at the Cascades, a famous architectural complex that is intended to connect the northern part of the city with its centre. The vision, full of spatial grandeur, fantasy and dreams, obviously belongs to the mind of Alexander Tamanian, but was not realised during his lifetime, remaining forgotten for decades. Cascades is created in the 1970s, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Soviet Armenia. It is a project plucked from the order of those decades, a dreamy yet very real construction. Rows of ascending stairs are fronted by a whole system of fountains, an intricate and carefully planned structure. It is presided over by the number 15 - initially told as the sum of all the republics of the USSR, but supposedly always concealing the number of Armenian regions as well. Cascades move through streams of water, dozens of sources, surreal sculptures-objects float on their floors, a world of dreams and hallucinations grows in the very centre of the city. It is a construction drawn from dreams of a mythical city, a life-giving space in which the inhabitants breathe. The Cascades also hide a museum inside itself, its inner space tells the memory of Armenia, seeks a visual identity for the place and the people. The paintings we saw occupied entire floors, huge formats holding Armenian epics, scenes and figures that change the history of this place. At the very top of the stairs, next to the highest fountains, we listened to a concert by Raphael Roginski, music dedicated to Armenia, Sayat Nova, the ornaments of this world. This tradition is strongly connected to the way and life of the musician - discovered very early, read from the pages of a book, guided Raphael among the first sounds of Eastern Europe. So the music resounded in a special place, overlooking Yerevan shimmering far away, with all the tradition of that city flowing in many streams beneath our meeting.
text: Piotr Szroeder
photo: Narek Dallakyan
