Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Armenia has been in transition between two states. A new model is arising, but its fluctuating nature remains unclear. A quarter of a century has already elapsed and the country, operating on the margins, is evolving according to its own rules, in its own temporality.
A situation that also affects the visual field: contemporary Armenia seems absent from the flow of images. There are no documents to illustrate the current developments of the young Republic – they seem to be missing, or concealed. The present seems eluded by the aspiration to an allegedly more promising future. Armenians are an ancient people living in a country that has been independent for 25 years; they evolve in a mutating environment in which business goes on as usual but produces nothing permanent.
In such a context, visual investigation is confronted by its own limits. How can what has yet to happen be documented? How should the history to come and the memory of the young country in-the-making be told?
Here, the photographic writing becomes reflexive and questions what an image can do. The documents that it produces – currently without function – remain receptacles to shelter a new story. Like the territory that inspired them, they are awaiting a development, and suggest that the unfinished is the theatre of multiple possibilities. This set of images constitutes the fictitious archives of memory being forged.
