The work is exhibited in the Yeni Tzami

In 2001 Anna Barseghian and Stefan Kristensen founded a cultural organisation based in Switzerland and Armenia. This organisation aims at promoting the developments of Armenia as a zone of cultural dialogue and at supporting the contemporary art of local artists and intellectuals.
The project titled “Armenography” came into being following interviews that these two conducted with people living inside or outside of Armenia, in places that are of particular symbolic and historical significance for this nation such as Aleppo (the first place where survivors of the 1915 Genocide fled to), Beirut (which at one point was considered to be the “capital” of the Armenian diaspora), Istanbul (one of the numerous centres of the Armenian community, at least in the 19th century), Yerevan (the capital actual independent of Armenia) and now Thessaloniki and Athens.
Furthermore, in two videos Armenian intellectuals living in the west (e.g. the director Atom Egoyan and others.) express their views on the identity, ideology and life of the artists of the diaspora. Lastly, in a separate and secluded room, there is a screening of a travelogue on an equally forbidden geographic area: the part of Western Armenia that belongs to Turkey. This is the part they call “the fatherland”, which constitutes a holy pilgrimage for many Armenians living inside or outside of the borders.
As Barseghian and Kristensen point out in a relevant text: “Armenography is far more than a mere delineation of the scattered existence of a nation. It is an attempt to contribute to the search for models that will help to construct an identity and culture that will combine three imperative needs: the active redefinition of the past, instead of the regurgitation of stereotypes, the development of collective structures, without which cultural production would be impossible, and the prevalence of individual research over any group values”.

Theodore Markoglou