Navigation – Plan du site

AccueilNuméros16ÉtudesSubstantiating Memories

Études

Substantiating Memories

The Unfolding of the Image-Object in Gianikian & Ricci Lucchi’s Armenity
Mémoires matérialisantes : le déploiement de l’image-objet dans Armenity de Gianikian et Ricci Lucchi
Miriam De Rosa
p. 53-72

Résumés

Cet article analyse le travail de Yervant Gianikian et d’Angela Ricci Lucchi pour l’exposition Armenity, organisée par Adelina Cüberyan v. Fürstenberg pour le pavillon arménien de la Biennale d’art de Venise en 2015. En s’appuyant sur deux œuvres de ces artistes et en les mettant en relation avec le lieu de l’exposition sur l’île de San Lazzaro, dans le contexte de la célébration du centenaire du génocide arménien, l’article soutient que la vidéo-témoignage Retour à Khodorciur (1986) et l’aquarelle Armenian Roll (1989-1991) corroborent matériellement la mémoire des histoires qu’elles racontent. Les caractéristiques de l’image électronique et l’esthétique du témoignage vidéo dans Retour à Khodorciur, ainsi que l’objet en soi et la référence aux fables arméniennes dans Armenian Roll, permettent de restituer l’héritage générationnel transmis par le père de Gianikian à Angela Ricci Lucchi et à Yervant Gianikian lui-même. Les œuvres exposées offrent aux spectateurs ce que j’appelle des images-objets, c’est-à-dire des images créées par les artistes pour concrétiser la dimension matérielle du souvenir. Simultanément, ces images matérialisent la tension entre effacement et présence, entre oppression et résistance, au point que leur production devient une stratégie des artistes pour exister et résister – pour r-exister.

Haut de page

Texte intégral

  • 1 In the curator’s words: “I was inspired by the French word “Arménité” to call the exhibition Armeni (...)
  • 2 Despite the exhibition catalogue indicating 16 artists, 18 contributed to Armenity. 18 was a delibe (...)
  • 3 A. Cüberyan v. Fürstenberg, 2015, 23.

1Armenity is the concept that Adelina Cüberyan v. Fürstenberg came up with when she received the challenging task of curating the Armenian Pavilion exhibition at the 2015 Venice Biennale. The project could not but revolve around the displaced, yet rich identity of Armenian culture, looking into its forcedly unfixed nature, to both “describe a new generation of artists and intellectuals in constant flux”,1 and of course honour the centenary commemoration of the Armenian genocide of 1915. Awarded the Golden Lion for best national participation, the exhibition didn’t simply offer access into Armenian identity but questioned it. The 18 selected artists2 reflected on what it meant as a ‘way of being in the world’ through the myriad connections that characterise Armenian diasporic culture as a formation in motion, inherently comprising encounters and exchanges. In their works, the selected artists all of them (grand)children of survivors of the Medz yeghern (Great Catastrophe) offer a variety of languages, media and techniques that whilst stemming from a shared root, are telling of multiple ways of expressing creativity, preserving their own voice, and defying homogenisation. Armenity is therefore “a direct reflection of a continuous process of preservation and enrichment that has allowed the Armenian culture to be integrated but not assimilated in even the most adverse conditions.”3 Stretching from Haig Aivazian’s precious oud to Aikaterini Gegisian’s books of collages, from Melik Ohanian’s sculpture Presence to Rene Gabri & Ayreen Anastas’s mixed media visual art pieces, from Silvina Der-Meguerditchian’s installation, Rosana Palazyan’s video installation, plants and embroidery, Mekhitar Garabedian’s neon and sound installations, up to Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi’s water-coloured paper roll and video, all these pieces which are but a selection of those on display give a sense of the material and technique variety.

  • 4 Founded in the 18th century when the monastery was established, the library includes various themed (...)

2Worth noting is also the location of the exhibition, as the Monastery of San Lazzaro saw the birth of the continuing Mekhitarists religious order by the Armenian monk Mekhitar in 1717. The monastery is known as a piece of Armenia outside the Armenian national (contested) territory, and is established as a key centre of creation, invention, and dissemination of an Armenian culture and history based on European Enlightenment models. The place has been and still is the site and emblem of a committed preservation of Armenian culture over the centuries. It has been active in fostering and sheltering Armenian heritage in very concrete ways – for instance through the publication of Pazmaveb, the first and longest-running Armenian scholarly journal (1843-today) and through an age-long book publishing, archiving, and copying effort. With approximately 150,000 books (of which 4,500 are manuscripts) produced and eventually lodged in the library,4 the impressive cataloguing and preservation work developed at San Lazzaro since its inception and the installation of the Armenian community, has spared much literature and poetry from oblivion. Not to mention the translation activity, which has significantly enabled the Armenian language and culture at large to defy time and hazardous events. From this perspective, the island of San Lazzaro not only is once more acknowledged as a beacon of knowledge, but it also epitomises Armenity in itself, making it the perfect substantiation of the spirit that the 2015 exhibition aimed at representing and cultivating. In other words, the exhibition managed to embody the spirit of Armenity. The selected pieces materially translated the effort to give shape, the urge to tell a population’s story, and the desire to make it heard. One could suggest that the show inherited the very same creation, preservation, and dissemination spirit that drives the San Lazzaro Island monastery, as it tried to offer an exquisite twenty-first-century version of these purposes through visual art modalities.

3In what follows, I propose to dwell on this idea of substantiation, because both the pieces on display and the venue per se embrace a particular sensitivity towards materiality, as a way of crystallising and at the same time mobilising Armenity. Moving well beyond a simple fetishist taste, the objectual nature of most of the artworks, the material facets and features of the media selected by the artists, as well as the island of San Lazzaro as a material site, offer a relevant springboard to reflect upon the relationships connecting objects and images, and thus material and visual cultures, by pairing ephemerality and concreteness in original ways.

  • 5 Yervant Gianikian was born in Merano to Armenian parents. He studied architecture in Venice and in (...)
  • 6 These are not the only pieces addressing Armenian diasporic identity, history and, unavoidably, the (...)
  • 7 The term echoes Marco Pasquini’s documentary film from 2006 entitled R-existence. Whilst the film f (...)
  • 8 D. Hibon, 2000, 3-4.

4In order to explore the dynamics between these concepts, I will focus on Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi’s works on display in the 2015 exhibition.5 Their contribution offers two very different “objectual shapes”, namely the testimonial video of the filmmaker’s father Return to Khodorciur (1986) and the water-coloured Armenian Roll (1989-1991).6 My claim is that both pieces interlace material and visual cultures producing at once a sense of fleeting memories and lost past, alongside one of unapologetic permanence and existence, the sum of which I propose to term r-existence. I wish to propose this notion to indicate the tension between erasure and presence, oppression and resistance at the heart of the 2015 Biennale pavilion show but also, more broadly, the artists’ oeuvre.7 In their films, videos, installations, as well as in their essayistic writing, they relentlessly engage in the effort of restituting the forgotten back to History: long-neglected faces, objects and gestures are brought back to light and life. Principally belonging to different minorities, persecuted and tyrannised groups or disregarded per se, these faces, objects, and gestures are allowed to resurface: this radical artistic act of resistance. Dealing mainly with memory issues, Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi’s art and use of archival material proposes and repurposes over and over the story of the people they encounter on the film stock they rework. Armenity is extra special since the story at stake is not that of unknown figures appearing from the scratched surface of the celluloid – as is often the case – but belongs to Gianikian’s own family. In her comment on Return to Khodorciur, Danièle Hibon has described the family history that is recounted in the piece as a message about “the infinite, paradoxical, and enduring capacity of humans to pass from horror to beauty.”8 R-existence is about enduring and a drive to resist adversity including atrocities, in order to inhabit the world in a firm yet blissful manner. The images crafted by the artists hint at the materiality of their selected medium which enhance, each in its own specific way, such a mode to inhabit the world.

  • 9 Art historian and researcher Neery Melkonian described the artworks selected for the Pavilion as a (...)

5Armenity makes the r-existence manifest, especially the artists’ two pieces under study. There, r-existence coincides with the remembering enabled the director’s father’s legacy, around which both selected pieces revolve. R-existence is thus performed by a person in the flesh through the act of testifying, before it gets visually translated by the artists onto different media (the video and the drawings) and finally becomes substantiated defying time by feeding into the couple’s artworks. The necessary tension between erasure and presence, oppression and resistance is what makes Armenity a living and processual concept. I suggest that Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi’s artworks offer an interpretation of such a tension, specifically by exemplifying the connection between crystallisation and mobilisation. Whilst presenting Armenity both as crystallised and ongoing, the two pieces as objects substantiate the authors’ ethos and message: their structural and formal composition enhance their relationship to concrete matter. They both assess the existence of an endangered identity that emerges through the artistic trajectory of Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi. The two pieces are profoundly diverse in their treatment of materiality and in their own way of being objects, however, I argue that the same emphasis on materiality endows the artworks with a set of affordances that elicit an implicit activity at the social and political levels. Put differently, they express the be-in-the-world-ness of a community that tries to undo the big denial imposed by the 1915 genocide and perpetuated by the lack of acknowledgment by its perpetrators.9

  • 10 T. Carroll et al., 2020, 7.

6As recent research in material culture studies suggests, objects are active within social practice as a potentiality to be caught by the subjects, more specifically: “the properties and affordances of objects means that the possible sociality is there, at least in some sense, before the socialisation of the material form.”10 This is particularly relevant if we consider that all the selected pieces included in the Armenity project – and surely Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi’s ones, in perfect continuity with their entire oeuvre – are meant to engage with visitors and raise awareness about Armenians’ denied history.

Return to Khodorciur: electronic grains of memory and the image-object

  • 11 On testimonial video, see S. Rollet, 2011, M.-A. Baronian, 2013 and 2020. For a thorough account on (...)
  • 12 The location of the shooting is provided in P. Azoury, 2001, 58. The two men have a direct relation (...)

7Return to Khodorciur (henceforth Return) taps into the narrative of the Armenian past in a rather explicit fashion. Installed in one of the rooms facing the San Lazzaro cloister without any particular setup to complement a bare screen and bench, the 72-minute video also offers quite a minimal scene onscreen. In a nearly fixed camera shot, we see elderly Raphael Gianikian, Yervant’s father, sitting in a home-like environment close to Yervant, as in a dialogue situation. This immediately sets the piece within the classical video-testimony scheme.11 Whilst we know the shooting took place in a Venetian hotel room, the setting is cosy and the fact that the two men have a personal connection to the city12 renders the sense of “return” all the more powerful. The circular movement is obviously reinforced by the piece title.

8The film thus starts as a father-and-son conversation, with the latter facilitating the former’s act of remembering. The domestic-looking place, then, produces an atmosphere of ease, which encourages a family conversation, one of those that may be revelatory, and unfolds in a confidential register. Soon enough, however, viewers realise that the announced dialogue actually turns into a monologue. Raphael reads out loud from his journal notes, and Yervant, who really represents the connecting figure between the narrator and the viewers, becomes the silent embodiment of the public onscreen, writing in the piece the posture that anybody watching the video will adopt – a posture of composure, reverence, and vivid reception that is typical of the witness of a traumatic event who starts narrating it.

  • 13 Y. Gianikian and A. Ricci Lucchi’s oeuvre, especially their moving-image works, is famous for a cha (...)

9Subtly shifting from medium shot to close-up, the image is construed as a long take revolving around a neat pivot, Raphael, or better yet, his story. Raphael stands as a person crystallising the ephemerality of history and meaning, by giving a voice to them. To highlight the importance of what he has to tell, the video leaves everything around him out of focus and in the background, including Yervant’s blurry and pixelated image appearing every now and then, as the shot imperceptibly alters. This nearly motionless and slow-paced picture, which will eventually become a key feature of the artists’ aesthetic style13 directs the viewers’ attention to the narration, as well as to the physical characteristics of the electronic image. As for the former, it is based on the protagonist’s diary (the piece is also talked about as Armenian Diary by the artists), which had been kept hidden for some ten years, and was unveiled only by the protagonist when he was in his eighties.

  • 14 Michael J. Hagopian goes on a similar journey to a deportation route in his documentary film The Ri (...)

10The reading from the diary is Raphael’s personal epic: a personal pilgrimage that rendered him stoic and nearly turned his journey into a heroic deed. As a survivor of the Genocide, he decided to return to his birthplace and the family town of Khodorciur which was swept away by the Catastrophe, on his own.14 After thorough preparation, in 1976, ten years prior to the shooting of this video, he left for Turkey. From there he walked along the trail of the long march that had been so deadly for many, whilst this had taken him to look for diasporic survival in Italy, with Venice as his first stop. The narration is rich in geographical and historical references, resulting in a detailed and dense whole.

  • 15 The text is said to be minimal in style, mainly because Raphael’s journal was originally written in (...)

11The entry to the rather minimal installation was free and uncontrolled in terms of viewing time, while the video was screened in loop. To make it easier for the viewers to follow, the entire video transcript had been printed out and was made available as an inspection copy, placed on the bench located in the room. Strikingly, the text is written in the present tense, even though memories of the journey and of Raphael’s childhood experiences, both from the past, intermingle.15 This is a central recurring feature across Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi’s entire production. On several occasions, they claimed that their effort to research and analyse history through found footage, as here in Return, is aimed at a reconstruction that is not retrospectively utilitarian per se, but at one that is rather meant to serve as a tool to read the present and possibly to build a more mindful future. In this video, as well as anywhere else in Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi’s works – including in the other artwork included in the Armenity show (discussed in the next section of the article) – the interweaving of different temporalities concurs to offer valid reasons to r-exist: why would we spectators ever oppose our resistance to the challenges of the present, if not to learn from the atrocities of the past in the hope they never take place again in the time to come?

  • 16 I delve more in detail into the mutual implications of different temporal dimensions in M. De Rosa, (...)

12As a matter of fact, it looks that such a mutual implication among past, present, and future is not solely a feature of the artists’ take on the history of Armenia: from Raphael’s journey to Armenia to the more famous Mandelstam’s one, it seems like the place and its history call for a multi-layered perception and reconstruction of time, whereby various temporal dimensions are twined together in ways that it is conceptually impossible to separate them.16 As he rides through the countryside of Alagez, poet Osip Mandelstam reflects on the tense that the land evokes:

  • 17 O. Mandelstam, 2018, 94.

What tense do you want to live in? I want to live in the imperative of the future passive participle, in the ‘what ought to be’. That’s the way I’d like to breathe. That’s what pleases me. There is such a thing as mounted, bandit band, equestrian honor. That is why I like the splendid Latin ‘gerundive’ – the verb on horseback. […] Such was the talk I carried on with myself as I rode horseback among the natural boundaries, the nomads’ territories and the gigantic pastures of Alagez.17

  • 18 Another significant reference on testimony in this instance is M. Nichanian, 2009 as well as M. Nic (...)

13Raphael seems to be willing to live in the present, a present that becomes the point of conjunction between lived experience and current recollection of the past; a time present that inspires the imperative of the future passive participle, because similarly to Mandelstam’s memoire, his memories, too, ought to be shared. What’s to be shared, however, is so traumatic that needs a form to make sense of it, it is so unbearable and inexplicable that it needs a shape to translate into, in order to be grasped.18 Mandelstam is a key and dear reference to Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi, and this is where, I contend, the fixity of the framing and the features of the medium come in to support the content, and substantiate what is too painful to be represented.

  • 19 M. Pfeifer, 2016.
  • 20 N. Melkonian, 2015a, 100.
  • 21 Ibidem.

14It has been observed very often as regards to the depiction of collective disasters and catastrophes occurring throughout history: as is the case with the Shoah, which represents a quite unavoidable term of comparison for the Catastrophe, the “depth of grief”19 revolving around the Armenian genocide fails to be fully representable either. As the other artists exhibiting in the show, Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi’s move to overcome this difficulty is to “shift from representing (i.e. the genocide) to investigating modes of (its) representations.”20 If, as art historian Neery Melkonian posits, the works on display within Armenity “give new relevance to iconic historical artifacts […] enabling new possibilities of being or becoming”,21 Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi’s contribution produce new artifacts to that end as well, but there’s more to it. A work such as Return alludes to, gives voice, takes up, and perhaps celebrates the opportunity to make the relevance of Armenity and its historical background concrete. In other words, it accords Armenity a material form. In this sense, I would like to propose that the video doesn’t simply work as a trace serving testimonial purposes but does substantiate what it aims to speak for in a new, non-definitive yet powerful configuration. That is, it enables Armenity to (r-)exist.

  • 22 S. Rollet, 2007.
  • 23 Y. Gianikian and A. Ricci Lucchi, 2015, my translation. On this topic, see M.-A. Baronian, 2018.

15Sylvie Rollet also commented on Return, pairing it with a few other films dealing with the Armenian genocide, her proposition being that these images fill the gap for the lack of first-hand images of the Catastrophe and, in their being anarchival, they attempt to validate the survivors’ testimonial agency, becoming themselves image-witnesses (image-témoin).22 Whilst I find this notion productive in the context of the testimonial video, whereby the emphasis falls on the witness and the practices of memory that they enable with the support of images (or the lack thereof), I would rather propose to focus on the materiality that images may attribute to memory, and on the attempt to give tangibility to it. In other terms, what seems to me possibly more crucial is the way in which images become image-witnesses, especially in relation to how materiality is involved in this process. I am particularly interested in this aspect because as I try to show materiality emerges as a structural and linguistic strategy adopted by the artists to come to terms with the void left by unspeakable pain. Also, the material quality of their artworks echoes the lack of materiality felt in the midst of spoliation, when everything had to be left behind: “a not so small part of Armenian culture was saved by those who sewed it on [their clothes] during the massacres and eventually recomposed it after the genocide.”23 Not only image-witnesses, then, but image-objects, opposing an ‘objectual’ character to history unfolding pitilessly, so as to cling to something in spite of all, r-exist, and make sense of reality.

  • 24 N. Melkonian, 2015a, 101.
  • 25 H. Steyerl, 2009.
  • 26 T. Carroll et al., 2020, 8.

16The mode of expression developed in Return, therefore, becomes particularly relevant, insofar as Raphael’s diary is entrusted with the task of voicing out an “intimate expression […] of the silences that give us pause from the weight of the unspeakable.”24 The objectual nature of the video plays an important role in contesting and contrasting the denial. This is built up via the nearly fixed position of the camera, which makes the video almost close to a painting due to the stasis of the image, thereby emphasising once more its physical tangibility. Moreover, the apparent pixilation typical of the “poor image”25 enables for the textural quality of the video work to arise in its porousness, rich as it is in constitutive patterns that make its surface a dense space, offering room for symbolic meanings to nest in. Also, the chromatic palette toned with a blue shade, and the visibly rastered structure of the image further underscore the materiality of the piece. The resulting focus on the characteristic graininess typical of the electronic image endows the video with a concreteness that, I suggest, helps to materially and aesthetically configure the irrepresentable. The material quality of the video concurring to make the installed piece an image-object emerges also in its ability to “relate within inter-artefactual domains or within various milieu of relational and sequential actions”,26 that is, in its ability to offer a concrete and thus understandable access point through which the viewers may relate with the contested Armenian past and Armenity on the whole.

  • 27 Ibid., 9.

17In this vein, the physical features of Return highlighted above enable the image-object to act as a site for historical accounting and, more broadly, of knowledge production, opening up untrodden narratives around the genocide, the diasporic identity triggered by them, and their political significance for times to come. In line with material culture studies, the image-object, as the objects these works explore, “can actively produce futures.”27 In effect, the mutual implication of past, present, and future, and the ability of images (as well as of collected objects) to retain these multiple dimensions feed into a thematic thread that is particularly close to Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi, and which is possible to retrieve all across their oeuvre. Associated with a specific attention reserved for the Armenian traumatic history, this comes out even more accomplishedly, in their Armenian Roll, which was also included in the Biennale pavilion in San Lazzaro.

Armenian Roll: watercolours, apples and a story to pass on

18As Return symbolically allowed Raphael Gianikian’s story to unfold, the Armenian Roll was quite literally unfolding its 17-metre length to visitors’ gaze, offering thereby a silent complement to Raphael’s video narration.

  • 28 On microhistory, see G. Levi, 1991 and C. Ginzburg, 1993.

19The piece is quite extraordinary in multiple ways: the numerous water-coloured illustrations are neatly ordered in vertical tiers placed one next to the other, and read from top to bottom and left to right; the arrangement gathers illustrations from 16 Armenian fables that Raphael used to tell and that his daughter-in-law Angela had painted over the years. In continuity with Return, then, but shifting onto a far more dream-like register, the roll describes a trajectory moving across Armenian culture that connects microhistory28 – Raphael’s personal and family story – to macrohistory, coming in the universal language of folktales.

  • 29 Y. Gianikian and A. Ricci Lucchi, 2015, my translation.

We have been ceaselessly building an archive of images, films, photographs, negative and positive prints, film plates, celluloid, ethnographic objects, toys, rugs’ fragments for many years” – claimed the artists – “On this occasion we put together a fabric whose texture is made up of fables.29

20The piece is rather special, not only in terms of its ability to visually crystallise an ancient oral tradition as well as a personal account of it, but also within Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi’s creative process. Gaining an increasing prominence in recent years, the couple has always worked with watercolours, next to their more famous moving image works, except that the former were more rarely displayed and are seldom known by the public. Used as a conceptual tool to flesh out the archival material employed in the artists’ work – be it footage or collections of objects – the watercolours are not a mere complementary appendix to the films and videos, but a sort of guide, a true dispositif for artistic creation, which literally disposes their imagery onto the visual space of the sheet, eventually translated into the frame. In other words, the watercolours play the role of storyboards for the moving image pieces by the couple, but exercise a visionary ability to synthesise and encapsulate a whole symbolic, intimate yet immediately graspable world that makes them artwork per se, beyond any ancillary function. Yervant Gianikan made it clear, highlighting the special role of the watercolours and at the same time their consistency with their moving image pieces:

  • 30 M. De Rosa, 2012.

Angela masters a sort of lightness, which she learned from Oskar Kokoschka, and she has an amazing visual memory. She is able to recreate people’s faces without seeing them while drawing. It is a precious talent. She is like a camera – by means of drawing she writes the journal of life.30

21In continuity with Raphael’s journal, then, the roll offers another take on the couple’s research on Armenity. Similarly to Return it is an image-object insofar as it crystallises this concept employing a peculiar materiality resulting from the poetic balance between the concreteness of the roll and the ephemerality of the watercolours.

  • 31 V. Cazolari Bouvier, 2015, 111.
  • 32 On the intimacy elicited by horizontality in relation to materiality, and differently from what I c (...)

22Exhibited in a glass case located on the first floor of the monastery, in an area between the common rooms and the library, the piece is undeniably a material object in itself: paper and the roll format remind of the hmayils – the Armenian prayer scrolls from the early modern era, that typically were a few inches wide but very long, inscribed with prayers, hymns and incantations, and that were carried and worn for protection. Also, the format is reminiscent of ancient East Asian scroll paintings, which were but shorter in height, lightweight, mobile and therefore used as handscrolls. “The Armenians have entrusted manuscripts with the preservation of the written heritage of their national language, which consists not just in religious works but also in scientific, historical and poetic ones, among others.”31 In effect, the Armenian Roll reminds of books and sacred writings that used to be rolled up to be moved and lodged with reverence in the genizah – a sacral feature definitely enhanced by the location of the exhibition, its religious status, and its reputation as a centre where books and Armenian manuscripts were well-respected and rewritten for preservation purposes. Despite its simplicity, the setup – a transparent shrine-like display cabinet made up of a table and a special glass cover – is efficient enough to prevent visitors from touching the piece and adds up another layer of materiality to the artwork. The physicality of the cellulose, its thickness and the paper grain texture, together with the dreamy watery consistency of the colour pigment spread on the surface of the object shall be considered as markers of the piece’s materiality, and all qualify the way in which it embodies Armenity. Bearing these features in mind, compared to Return, the Armenian Roll surely falls under the category of the image-object in a more straight-forward fashion. Yet, this is not to simply be traced back to its objectual nature: whilst the affordances of the roll-shape certainly reinforce the adherence to this description, both the mode of display of the piece and the peculiar aspect of the images contribute to applying this definition, too. As far as the former is concerned, the roll is obviously exhibited unfolded and lying on a horizontal surface. Generally connected to a sense of agency more than of contemplation, such horizontal orientation clashes here with the impossibility to operate on the piece which is, as explained above, presented in a glass case making it untouchable. With the viewers’ pragmatic agency blocked from the very outset, the disposition elicits another kind of agency, that is, the one of the roll itself, because the horizontality of the piece calls the subjects to look at it and dwell into its grain.32 This is where the reference to ancient Asian scroll painting provides a useful concept that seems to confirm the affordances of the image-object, and namely the notion of “you” typical of Taoist philosophy. “You” stands for touring and roaming, an effect achieved thanks to the shape of the image and the unfolding of the surface on which it is painted, both concurring to a compositional structure specifically conceived to elicit the above-mentioned dwelling. The disposition of the various illustrations in tiers and lines reinforces the same result and perfectly aligns with the aim of “you”, which has been defined as follows:

  • 33 L. Niantong and D. Yu, 1985.

The secret of designing any sequence of successive space arrangements lies in the art of regulating them so that they are ‘separated’ but not exactly ‘isolated’ from one another. The audience should be tempted to let their imagination ‘roam’ and ‘tour’ therein, as anyone watching the horizontal handscroll paintings Landscape of a Thousand Leagues (by the Northern-Song painter Wang Ximeng) and The Long River Runs for Ten Thousand Leagues (by the Southern-Song painter Zhao Ba) would be tempted to.33

23Complying with the notion of “you”, the painted images also work as image-objects, for they serve as a substantiation of the narration, translating its plot into a visual shape that crystallises part of the tradition behind the exhibition Armenity. At the same time, the images manage to preserve their ephemeral, imaginative and evocative quality – a fruitful watery vagueness that echoes the opening formula of the fables “there was and there was not”, whereby meticulous details are left out in favour of a productively loose mise en forme of the folktales. Such a sense of flow catches the flux featuring the concept of Armenity by capturing the liquid tickling of the coloured water dripping on the surface of the roll, and spreading across the pencil contours of the figures sketched by Angela. The most wondrous creatures emerge in the process: not only kings and princesses, but also fire horses, brothers with golden and silver hair, benevolent snakes, lightning swords, or astoundingly beautiful maids taking the souls in heaven or living inside a pomegranate. Though fixed on the roll, their consistence exudes luminosity and life, as if they were about to ride the wind and, as one of the fable characters, suddenly fly away from the paper surface.

  • 34 S. Orfalyan, 2014, my translation. Variations on the formula include for the people, for those who (...)
  • 35 I hint at the artists’ film/video series Frammenti Elettrici (2002-2012).

24Whilst impossible to operate pragmatically, the roll gives itself to the viewers and interpellates them: with its delicate fluid strokes, the illustrations substantiate a heritage that fully makes sense the minute it is passed onto someone else. Such a passage from one generation to the next is definitely apparent in Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi’s artwork, especially when coupled with Return, as it is in the Armenity exhibit, where the strong family bond facilitates the narrative transmission. In fact, according to Armenian fables, this actually transcends the family stricto sensu, as the transmission inherently includes those who listen to them in the beautiful and evocative closing formula: “three apples fell from the sky. One is for the storyteller, one for the listener, and one for the whole world”34 – we are (part of) the whole world. This is a crucial aspect from a conceptual point of view, because it taps into the important research on temporality carried on by the artists both for Armenity and, more broadly, throughout their entire work. Listeners’ involvement (as well as the viewers’ in the case of the video and of the artists’ films/installations) participates in the task of recounting – a step that is necessary for a well-needed engagement with the poetic and wise register of the fables but also, and perhaps more stringently, with the crude, violent images of deportation, war and fanaticism that most often populate Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi’s works. As images displaying or alluding to incommensurable atrocities are likely to cause electrical shocks,35 the emphasis on materiality provided by the image-object becomes yet another method to hook the public and call for their further consideration. The tripartite scheme of the three apples formula in the roll puts side by side Raphael who narrated in the first place, Angela and Yervant who listened to him and the rest of the world as a potential continuer of the process. Further, it is reproduced here switching the position of the artists in the first role and locating us, the audience, in the position they formerly occupied, building a chain fed by the expansion-by-inclusion of those exposed to the power of testimony. In the end, those who listen to a witness become a witness. The operationality that is precluded on a material level in the exhibition is ‘spared for’ and relaunched ad memoriam posteritati.

  • 36 Y. Gianikian and A. Ricci Lucchi, 2015.

There is this beautiful relationship: the father [Raphael] puts in our hands and gifts us a poetic part of his ‘Caucasian’ culture and we hold it to pass it on in turn to whomever looks at and listens to it. This relationship needed to take a shape, a form of expression – a shape not disjointed from its meaning. This is how the idea of the roll came into being.36

  • 37 N. Melkonian, 2015a, 105.

25This is also how the roll empowers anybody looking at it, offering them a way out of forgetfulness, as if it were an apple fallen from the sky: remembering and passing on the heritage stands for “a glimmer of hope in undoing wrongs, mending a century of disconnects, letting go of exhausted means, experimenting, starting afresh.”37

Unfolding the image-object to r-exist

  • 38 Ibidem.
  • 39 “De même que le futur antérieur constituerait le seul temps propre à rendre compte de la tempora (...)

26As Melkonian has argued, “total annihilation occurs when a society is not allowed to mourn, or if a society forgets how to mourn, and […] artistic practice is the only way to reverse that (self) denial.”38 The interlacing of different agencies in the act of remembering is mirrored in the interweaving of different temporalities and the artists are rather explicit on the need to respond to the threat of oblivion and, consequently, of annihilation across multiple moments in time, all historically connected to each other. Whilst according to Rollet, the appropriate time to employ in order to give an account of the Catastrophe is future perfect simple,39 as I have demonstrated for Return, in Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi, there is a necessary implication between multiple temporal dimensions, because the work on the past is something intergenerational that happens in the present for the benefit of the future. In the case of the Roll, this process is possibly more exacerbated insofar as the testimony brought to the present in the interest of what’s to come happens thanks to a narration coming from a dimension that is nearly out of time – that of traditional oral history, and namely of fables. This shows how, in the artists’ works, any form of memorial practice serves the purpose of r-existence. The reaffirmation of those who were denied in their being, erased, and removed, arise powerfully in modes that are simultaneously respectful and delicate. The fabric that results from this peculiar weaving twines together affirmation and reverence; memory and contemporaneity; past, present, and future. Passing on the story of someone known, of the family, one’s story, as well as those traditional stories that were told to children or when families gathered, with their ancient flavour of time past and magic, becomes a way to let them be and resist the flow of time itself.

  • 40 S. Bailey, 2015, 114; N. Melkonian, 2015b; T. Carroll et al., 2020, 10.

27In her discussion of Armenity, writer and editor Stephanie Bailey mentions “Muriel Rukeyser’s observation that the universe is made of stories, not atoms.” The artists featured in the Biennale pavilion are to be seen as “new cartographers leading the way to a future that has not quite taken shape. […] a journey which started in 1915 and has led to all points of the globe, has not ended.”40 From their position as radical, avant-gardist, and sensitive artists, Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi possibly embody such a “cartographic” attitude, reclaiming the material dimension of remembrance, as well as of the visionary imaginative power of the new identities that can stem out of the traditional narrative. They use the narration of the historical past as their compass to orientate their navigation and their public’s across the perilous waters of memory removal. To resist and react to this, their entire artistic yield is basically informed by the scheme discussed above: regardless of what oppressor the specific work refers to, the conceptual labour they develop invites us, as viewers/visitors, to partake in their quest, which revolves around this intertwining of temporal threads, in which we are key to guaranteeing the story’s continuous motion. Crystallisation and substantiation are only needed to give a shape to memorial material and history to be passed on, and thus mobilised. Be the issue at stake Western colonialism in the early 20th century oppressing African populations (Lo specchio di Diana, 1996; La marcia dell’uomo, 2001) or going to have fun at the expense of helpless animals during hunting and safari sessions (Diario africano, 1994; Tourisme vandale; Dal polo all’equatore, 1986); be it fascism in all its shapes and forms (Uomini, anni, vita, 1990; Pays Barbare, 2013; Inventario balcanico, 2000, install. 2003); or be it opposite sides at war (Prigionieri della Guerra, 1995; Su tutte le vette e’ pace, 1998; Sarajevo, 1997), religious fanaticism (I diari di Angela: Noi due cineasti 1, 2018), or hyper-consumerism (Frammenti elettrici 3 – Corpi, 2002), the pattern applies to those films and videos, and offers the artists’ first-person engagement as a call and a springboard for others’ to join.

  • 41 N. Melkonian, 2015b.
  • 42 T. Carroll et al., 2020, 10.

28Clearly charged of an ethical-political value that is dear to the artists, the elaboration on Armenity is no exception and, therefore, falls into this systematic work of re-enlivening history. To do so and as this article demonstrates, they opt out for fleshing out memory thanks to an object-inspired sensitivity. This does not intend to oversimplify the complexity of memory itself. Rather, as Neery Melkonian has observed for younger artists exhibiting at the Armenity pavilion, the choice to privilege material art-objects helps to propose new narratives that open up an access into the Armenity concept from unexpected, original standpoints. They “bypass official narratives entrenched in preservation ideologies and exhausted nationalist rhetoric”41 to renew Armenian cultural and polycentric identity. This is perhaps less apparent in Return, where the presence of Yervant Gianikian in the frame and the non-visible yet palpable presence of Ricci Lucchi behind the camera already introduce a second-generation, internationally relocated identity. Questioning the Armenian identity as such, the video relates to the tactics of inhabiting the world and finding one’s own way of expressing cultural belonging. The same can be said about the Roll, which again stems from a traditional narrative but somewhat rephrases it by way of visual language, thereby enhancing the artistic work made by Ricci Lucchi to translate Raphael and – by extension – its oral history heritage into her own watercolour painting practice. Additionally, the nature of the format hints at the portability and unfolding gesture characterising the roll as an object which matches well the idea of diasporic culture that finds its articulation as it moves, that is, as a formation in motion that definitely does not oversee tradition but aims at looking ahead of itself. In this view, the grain of the video image and the roll as image-object reunite together the markers of different temporal dimensions. According to Adam Drazin, this “dynamism of objectual temporality” is retained in objects’ biographies, “moving simultaneously through time as well as space, and […] in this their futures are tangled up in their present.”42 Precisely in such a dynamism, I suggest, lies the mobilisation potential of the image-object: it is neither simply motion across times, nor simply the ability of images to be mobile – on the screen in the case of the video and at the centre of the process of folding/unfolding when it comes to the roll –, but a socio-ethical call. As such, this call is able to activate a critical posture enabling to r-exist, as in an invitation to mobilise in a political sense, to remain alert, and detect the signs of dangerous pitfalls causing history to repeat. From their artworks, Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi offer us an apple that falls on us: it is up to us to take it into our hands.

Haut de page

Bibliographie

Azoury Philippe, “Sur certaines radiations encore loin d’être claires”, Trafic, 38, 2001, 50-62.

Bailey Stephanie, “Transition Times”, in Adelina Cüberyan v. Fürstenberg (ed.). Armenity/Hayoutioun, exhib. cat., Milan: Skira, 2015, 113-117.

Baronian Marie-Aude, Mémoire et image: Regards sur la Catastrophe arménienne, Lausanne: L’Âge d’homme, 2013.

Baronian Marie-Aude, “Weaving Images: Textile, Displacement, and Reframing the Borders of Visual Culture”, in Kathryn Babayan and Michael Pifer (eds.), An Armenian Mediterranean: Words and Worlds in Motion, New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018, 207-219.

Baronian Marie-Aude, “Entre les visages: l’image-témoin en glissement”, Intermédialités, 36, Fall 2020, 1-20.

Baronian Marie-Aude, “Screenic fashion: horizontality, minimal materiality and manual operation”, Journal of Visual Culture, 19 (3), 2020, 378-390.

Bhabha Homi, The Location of Culture, London and New York: Routledge 1994.

Bouvier Calzolari Valentina, Armenia, Country of Stones – Armenia, Country of Books, in Adelina Cüberyan v. Fürstenberg (ed.). Armenity/Hayoutioun, exhib. cat., Milan: Skira, 2015, 109-112.

Carroll Timothy, Antonia Walford and Shireen Walton (eds.). Lineages and Advancements in Material Culture Studies: Perspectives from UCL Anthropology, London: Routledge, 2020.

Cati Alice, Immagini della memoria: Teorie e pratiche del ricordo tra testimonianza, genealogia, documentari, Milan: Mimesis, 2013.

Cüberyan v. Fürstenberg Adelina (ed.), Armenity/Hayoutioun, exhib. cat., Milan: Skira, 2015.

De Cuir Jr Greg and Miriam De Rosa, “A treatise on the apparatus and the artistic yield of Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi”, Millennium Film Journal, 64, Fall 2016, 68-75.

De Rosa Miriam, “A Poetics of Care: Slowness, Ethics and Enchantment in Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi’s Oeuvre”, Found Footage Magazine, 3, 2017, 28-37.

De Rosa Miriam, “Non Non Non – Visiting the exhibition with Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi”, NECSUS, 1, 2012, 346-357, https://necsus-ejms.org/non-non-non-visiting-the-exhibition-with-yervant-gianikian-and-angela-ricci-lucchi/ (last accessed 20 August 2022).

Drazin Adam, “The object biography”, in Timothy Carroll, Antonia Walford, Shireen Walton (eds.), Lineages and Advancements in Material Culture Studies: Perspectives from UCL Anthropology, London: Routledge, 2020, 61-74.

Ferrari Aldo (ed.), L’Armenia perduta: Viaggio nell memoria di un popolo, Rome: Salerno, 2019.

Gianighian Raphael, Khodorciur. Viaggio di un Pellegrino alla ricerca della sua Patria, Venice: Casa Editrice Armena, 1992.

Gianikian Yervant and Angela Ricci Lucchi, “Notre caméra analytique”, Trafic, 13, Winter 1995, 32-40.

Gianikian Yervant and Angela Ricci Lucchi, “Papà, mi racconti una storia?”, Il Manifesto, 1 May 2015, https://ilmanifesto.it/papa-mi-racconti-una-storia

Ginzburg Carlo, “Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know about It”, Critical Inquiry, 20 (1), 1993, 10-35.

Hermet Aleramo and Paola Cogni Ratti di Desio, La Venezia degli Armeni: Sedici secoli, tra storia e leggenda, Milan: Mursia, 1993.

Hibon Danièle, “Retour sur un exil”, in Raphael Gianikian, Yervant Gianikian, Retour à Khodorciur, with texts by Danièle Hibon, Raphael and Yervant Gianikian, Paris: Jeu de Paume, 2000, 3-4.

Kazanjian David and Marc Nichanian, “Between Genocide and Catastrophe”, in David Eng and David Kazanjian (eds.), Loss: The Politics of Mourning, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002, 125-147.

Levi Giovanni (ed.), New Perspectives on Historical Writing, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991.

Lumley Robert, Entering the Frame: Cinema and History in the Films of Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, Bern: Peter Lang, 2011.

Mandelstam Osip, Journey to Armenia, Mirefoot: Notting Hill Editions, 2018.

Melkonian Neery, “Undoing Denials: Mapping a Curatorial Terrain, Armenity/Hayoutioun”, in Adelina Cüberyan v. Fürstenberg (ed.), Armenity/Hayoutioun, exhib. cat., Milan: Skira, 2015 (a), 99-108.

Melkonian Neery, “Undoing Denials at the Venice Biennale’s Armenian Pavilion”, Hyperallergic 25 August 2015 (b), https://hyperallergic.com/231777/undoing-denials-at-the-venice-biennales-armenian-pavilion/ (last accessed 10 August 2022).

Melkonian Neery, “Armenity 2015: Exploring Armenian Identity in contemporary Art of the Diaspora”, AGBU webtalks July 2017 https://agbuwebtalks.org/page/armenity-2015-exploring-armenian-identity-in-contemporary-art-of-the-diaspora-

Niantong Lin and Diana Yu, “A Study of the Theories of Chinese Cinema in their Relationship to Classical Aesthetics”, Modern Chinese Literature, 1 (2), 1985, 185-200.

Nichanian Marc, The Historiographic Perversion, translated by Gil Anidjar, New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.

Orfalyan Sonya, A cavallo del vento: fiabe d’Armenia, Lecce: Argo, 2014.

Pfeifer Moritz, “Depth of Grief? Historical Evidence in the Armenian Films of Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi”, East European Film Bullettin, 69, 2016 https://eefb.org/retrospectives/historical-evidence-in-the-armenian-films-of-yervant-gianikian-and-angela-ricci-lucchi/ (last accessed 10 August 2022).

Rollet Sylvie, “Personne ne témoigne pour le témoin”, Chimères, 63 (1), 2007, 191-212.

Rollet Sylvie, Une éthique du regard: le cinéma face à la catastrophe, d’Alain Resnais à Rithy Panh, Paris: Hermann 2011.

Steyerl Hito, “In defense of the poor image”, e-flux Journal, 10, 1 November 2009, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/ (last accessed 5 August 2022).

Toffetti Sergio (ed.), Yervant Gianikian, Angela Ricci Lucchi, Turin: Hopefulmonster, 1992.

Tölölyan Khachig, “Rethinking Diaspora(s): Stateless Power in the Transnational Moment”, Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, 5 (1), 1996, 3-36.

Haut de page

Notes

1 In the curator’s words: “I was inspired by the French word “Arménité” to call the exhibition Armenity/Hayoutioun. It seemed to me an appropriate new word to describe a new generation of artists and intellectuals in constant flux, with a large diversity of self-defining, which however kept a subjective sense of being-in-the-world” (A. Cüberyan v. Fürstenberg, 2015, 23). As one of the anonymous reviewers of this article suggested, this concept resembles much earlier ideas about diaspora expressed by scholars such as Homi Bhabha and Khachig Tölölyan. Key references in this instance are H. Bhabha 1994 and K. Tölölyan 1996.

2 Despite the exhibition catalogue indicating 16 artists, 18 contributed to Armenity. 18 was a deliberate choice, symbolically evoking Abbott Mekhitar’s 18 disciples who founded the Armenian Benedictine Order on the island of San Lazzaro. I am very grateful to the anonymous reviewer suggesting the connection.

3 A. Cüberyan v. Fürstenberg, 2015, 23.

4 Founded in the 18th century when the monastery was established, the library includes various themed sections, most of the heritage dating back to the period between the opening and 1830. On the relevance of San Lazzaro in the broader context of the preservation and promotion of Armenian culture, as well as in relation to the city of Venice, see A. Hermet and P. Cogni Ratti di Desio, 1993; A. Ferrari, 2019.

5 Yervant Gianikian was born in Merano to Armenian parents. He studied architecture in Venice and in the early seventies met Angela Ricci Lucchi (Lugo di Romagna 1942 – Milan 2018), who was trained as a painter and studied with Oskar Kokoschka. Upon meeting each other, the couple started working with video and film, focussing on violence in various shapes and forms throughout history: oppression appears in their oeuvre as war, but also as the visual exhibition of the colonialised body, the exercise of power on animals, hyper-consumerism in today’s Western society and hyper-visualisation in contemporary media.

6 These are not the only pieces addressing Armenian diasporic identity, history and, unavoidably, the genocide within the artists’ production. Worth mentioning are the short video Io ricordo (1997) and the 16 mm feature length Uomini Anni Vita (1990), which are discussed in Lumley 2011. Equally interesting to mention, is the Armenity curator’s decision to construct the Roll as a significant complement to Return to Khodorciur. Compared to the titles analysed in Lumley, these two pieces definitely offer a less refined (Return) and more tangible (Roll) interpretation of the narrated events.

7 The term echoes Marco Pasquini’s documentary film from 2006 entitled R-existence. Whilst the film focusses on the story of five Lebanese women returning home after the war who face the challenges of erasure, reconstruction, identity, contested existences and resistance, the notion I am proposing abstracts these instances from the specific Lebanese context and suggests to see r-existence as a lense to explore the tension between existing and resisting, here in the case of traumatic Armenian history.

8 D. Hibon, 2000, 3-4.

9 Art historian and researcher Neery Melkonian described the artworks selected for the Pavilion as a gesture of “undoing denials” (N. Melkonian, 2015a, 99-108).

10 T. Carroll et al., 2020, 7.

11 On testimonial video, see S. Rollet, 2011, M.-A. Baronian, 2013 and 2020. For a thorough account on video-testimonies focussing the autobiographical perspective, see A. Cati, 2013.

12 The location of the shooting is provided in P. Azoury, 2001, 58. The two men have a direct relationship with the city in so far as Raphael landed in Venice as a first port of call in Italy, and eventually sent his two sons to study in the city. Consequently, Yervant received his education first in the San Lazzaro college, then at IUAV university where his brother Giorgio, who still lives in town, became a professor in architecture. Perhaps worth mentioning is also that Raphael’s memoir Khodorciur. Viaggio di un Pellegrino alla ricerca della sua Patria, was also published in Venice at the beginning of the 1990s.

13 Y. Gianikian and A. Ricci Lucchi’s oeuvre, especially their moving-image works, is famous for a characteristic treatment of the image that slows down its pace, making it for an emblematic example of slow cinema. Whilst this text is not devoted to their creative process and style, it is nonetheless worth mentioning that the slowing effect created on film materials is achieved by means of a special tool they artisanally fabricated in 1985, just a year before Return was produced, the analytical camera. Despite the fact that the medium used in the latter is radically different compared to analogue film, the image in Return aesthetically (and thus not technically) replicates the same work achieved by intervening on the film support. The analytical camera allows the artists to slow the image in so far as it re-films the film at a lower FPS rate than the standard 24: through a manual scroll the original film is unrolled and an optical printer shoots it. This de-structuring and re-structuring of the filming process enables the artists to hoover longer on a specific frame, to zoom in or out within the frame, to analyse what the speed of the film might make invisible. On the analytical camera, see Y. Gianikian and A. Ricci Lucchi, 1995; for a broader take on the artists’ aesthetic style and its linkages with their working process, refer G. de Cuir and M. De Rosa, 2016.

14 Michael J. Hagopian goes on a similar journey to a deportation route in his documentary film The River Ran Red (2009). Thanks to the anonymous reviewers for proposing this connection.

15 The text is said to be minimal in style, mainly because Raphael’s journal was originally written in Armenian and his tone has probably gone lost in his translation into Italian. Yet, this very translation became the basis for his memoir of the journey back to Khodorciur, whose introduction by Pietro Kuciukian also dwells on language: the reading is not so smooth in more than one passage “due to the density and remoteness of [the narrated] facts on the one hand, and to the Italian language which constraints the writing within rhythms typical of Armenian language and thus that do not belong to it.” On the style of the video, I return below, but for a more general reflection, see S. Toffetti, 1992; the quotation, translated by me, is taken from R. Gianighian, 1992, 5.

16 I delve more in detail into the mutual implications of different temporal dimensions in M. De Rosa, 2017.

17 O. Mandelstam, 2018, 94.

18 Another significant reference on testimony in this instance is M. Nichanian, 2009 as well as M. Nichanian and D. Kazanjian, 2002.

19 M. Pfeifer, 2016.

20 N. Melkonian, 2015a, 100.

21 Ibidem.

22 S. Rollet, 2007.

23 Y. Gianikian and A. Ricci Lucchi, 2015, my translation. On this topic, see M.-A. Baronian, 2018.

24 N. Melkonian, 2015a, 101.

25 H. Steyerl, 2009.

26 T. Carroll et al., 2020, 8.

27 Ibid., 9.

28 On microhistory, see G. Levi, 1991 and C. Ginzburg, 1993.

29 Y. Gianikian and A. Ricci Lucchi, 2015, my translation.

30 M. De Rosa, 2012.

31 V. Cazolari Bouvier, 2015, 111.

32 On the intimacy elicited by horizontality in relation to materiality, and differently from what I claim in this text, by pragmatically operating on the piece, see M.-A. Baronian, 2020.

33 L. Niantong and D. Yu, 1985.

34 S. Orfalyan, 2014, my translation. Variations on the formula include for the people, for those who paid attention, for those who ate it, as to indicate the metabolization of the wisdom passed on by the fable, which used to typically be told in the odà, that is, the area of the house where families gathered to listen to the elderly or travellers to tell the stories.

35 I hint at the artists’ film/video series Frammenti Elettrici (2002-2012).

36 Y. Gianikian and A. Ricci Lucchi, 2015.

37 N. Melkonian, 2015a, 105.

38 Ibidem.

39 “De même que le futur antérieur constituerait le seul temps propre à rendre compte de la temporalité d’après-coup de l’événement catastrophique, de même est-ce ‘l’entre-image’ qui constituerait le nouveau ‘partage du visible’ susceptible de s’ouvrir à la ‘revenance’ de ce qui n’a jamais ‘eu lieu’” (S. Rollet, 2007, 195).

40 S. Bailey, 2015, 114; N. Melkonian, 2015b; T. Carroll et al., 2020, 10.

41 N. Melkonian, 2015b.

42 T. Carroll et al., 2020, 10.

Haut de page

Pour citer cet article

Référence papier

Miriam De Rosa, « Substantiating Memories »Études arméniennes contemporaines, 16 | 2025, 53-72.

Référence électronique

Miriam De Rosa, « Substantiating Memories »Études arméniennes contemporaines [En ligne], 16 | 2025, mis en ligne le 15 décembre 2025, consulté le 04 mars 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/eac/3699 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15gmd

Haut de page

Auteur

Miriam De Rosa

Ca’ Foscari, University of Venice

Haut de page

Droits d’auteur

CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont susceptibles d’être soumis à des autorisations d’usage spécifiques.

Haut de page
Rechercher dans OpenEdition Search

Vous allez être redirigé vers OpenEdition Search