Memory Books: Mapping Histories of Ethnic Coexistence

This article examines Armenian artistic and cultural practitioners’ uses of memory-mapping to create representational spaces in book form that challenge hegemonic national representations of territories with multiple, conflicted histories. Such mappings often draw on cartographic documents, but the projects discussed here reflect a broader definition of mapping as process. Vigen Galstyan and Nelli Shishmanyan's (2020) project Before the Crossfire. After the Wall provides a photographic record of everyday life in Armenian villages whose Azerbaijani populations have left since 1991 and tensions over Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) and Georgian villages where both ethnic Armenians and Azerbaijanis still co-exist. The NGO Cultural and Social Narratives Laboratory's project Firdus: Memory of a Place collects family stories, photographs, and documents from the multicultural residents of a central Yerevan street of around eighty houses. Our interpretations of these projects demonstrate that they employ artistic and cultural mapping practices in book form to recover memories of ethnic coexistence in Armenia; community memories that have been marginalized in the wake of three decades of conflict. The multimedial approaches to memory-mapping (oral histories, maps, social media, archival and original photographs) adopted by these texts offer a set of tools for the mapping of community memory. However, from an agonistic perspective, we argue that these tools could also be used to document the historical conditions that precipitated the collapse of coexistence. To this end, we analyze NGO Hazarashen's 2019 project Fragments of Armenia's Soviet Past: Tracing Armenian-Azerbaijani Coexistence to better understand how memory-mapping in book form can engage with political processes that facilitate the breakdown of coexistence.