Mery Aghakhanyan
My lovely land, my home, I miss you… (2015)
The nations are in their profound sleep and the question is in which world they want to be awakened.
Deep, inwardly hidden indifference slowly devours us and we must study to recognize its face, with its thousand forms and modifications. Genocide isn’t a history, we are tired from, it’s inside us; we have been massacred from policy, governments, from ISIS, from the worst systems, that were created to dominate us.
The first genocide of the 20th Century was the Armenian Genocide, when nearly two million Christian Armenians living in Turkey were eliminated from their historic homeland through forced deportations and massacres between 1915-1918. They were killed, butchered, drowned, and burnt. I wanted walk in those areas, where part of my blood has lived from the ancient times. Where are they now, 2 million murdered Armenians, in heaven? Thousands of ghosts stand beyond these native mountains and canyons. They can only give their memories to the earth, they can’t talk, only I can shout for the millions of murdered names ‘My lovely Land, my home, I miss you…’
I shot in film, in few exposures using old pictures from 1915 and before that, overlaid with the reality from nearly the same parts of the land. The people pictured in the old photos didn’t smile there…
I could only hear Turkish and Kurdish. Only in some hidden places I could hear words in sweet Western Armenian language, from the mouths of Muslim Armenians, who hide their Armenian identities. I could hear bits of Armenian songs the singers had learnt from their grandmothers and cried while singing, like little children…
Chaotic creations of times are going deeper in those spaces, where everything began. The lost child wants to find his parents; the man is searching of God. What I am searching for in the Western Armenian land, known as Turkey for the rest of the world? I am searching for the part of my soul, what was physically murdered and now lives between the Earth and the Heaven: the soul, that creates its own world of spirits, where they dream to come home.
