| |
|
|
|
Venue
Moni Lazariston / Bazaar Hamam / Warehouse C, Thessaloniki Port Area / Museum of Byzantine Culture / Courtyard of the Archaelogical Museum of Thessaloniki
Artist
Vahram Aghasian
 Artists's biography |
| |
|
|
|
 |
|
Ghost Town, photograph, 2005 |
|
|
 |
|
Ghost Town, photograph, 2005 |
|
|
 |
|
Ghost Town, photograph, 2005 |
|
|
 |
|
Ghost Town, photograph, 2005 |
|
|
 |
|
Ghost Town, photograph, 2005 |
|
|
|
|
Ghost Town
Gyumri is the second largest city of Armenia (Population: 149,000), which had suffered greatly in the 1988 earthquake. In aid of the people who had lost their houses, the Soviet government decided to build an area called Mush. It is a rather large area next to the city. The construction started in 1989, but was never completed. Eighteen years have passed, a lot of money has been spent, but still this area stands like a ghost town, totally empty, totally deserted. There are many Ghost Towns throughout the post-soviet countries; one example is Pripyat, which is next to the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the new governments did not have sufficient funds to support some small cities surrounding strategically important bases. People in these cities were left all by themselves. We can call the Mush area a Ghost Town, but it is different from most of the ghost towns that are well known to people, some of which today even constitute the subject of guided tours. Most of the ghost towns were abandoned, but there are also areas that were already half-built when the Soviet Union collapsed. Mush is one of these.
The interesting thing is that Mush, this dreadful “desert” of buildings, is only 10 minutes away from the city centre. On your way you can see people still living in the temporary containers that were set up for workers in the aftermath of the earthquake.
Every ghost town has its own ghosts living in it, but the problem with ghosts is that you never know if they are there or not. In the Mush area you can always sense the ghostly presence of modernism. It is a ghost in the sense that modernist constructions were never completed. Modernism in Armenia will never go away, because it had never fully arrived.
These buildings may never be completed; they have been left at the mercy of time and the weather. Someday they will fade away, but before they do so, they will continue to stand there silently, conveying their messages to us. When standing in the middle of the Mush area observing these buildings that have failed to serve their function, one cannot but think of their future and of the utopian aura surrounding them.
|
|
|
|
|
