Making local - Soil & Pigments
Spore hosts: Bone Memories
The Armenian Genocide and the Radical Possibility of Solidarity
25. January 2024
18.00-20.00
18.00-20.00
Save the Date
for adults
in English
This presentation illuminates the earliest Armenian pilgrimages to Dayr al-Zur in the Syrian Desert where the survivor community interacted with the remains of Armenians murdered during the Armenian Genocide (1915-1918) in acts of remembrance that activate “bone memory.” Using archival documents alongside recorded testimony of survivors, the presentation explores the genesis of these memory practices, which largely halted during the Syrian War. When Islamic State (Da‘esh) occupied and massacred Arab and Yazidi populations where Armenians were murdered a century earlier, Dayr al-Zur’s necrogeography was reinscribed. Considering the catastrophic loss and the absence of memorials to these events, can collective mourning and memory work inspire radical possibilities of solidarity and restitution in post-war Syria and beyond?
Register here
The event is part of the BEYONDREST Conversation Series “Restitution and its Vantage Points: Beyond the Preservation Paradigm.” Beyond Restitution: Heritage, (Dis)Possession and the Politics of Knowledge (BEYONDREST) is an ERC-funded, five-year research project at the Forum Transregionale Studien (Project No. 101045661). More information on the project and the conversation series can he found here.
Vahan Papazian, a former member of the Ottoman parliament, looks upon the bones of murdered Armenians in Dayr al-Zur (1930).The event is organized in cooperation with Café Arakil, Spore Initiative and the Critical Armenian Studies Collective.
Views and opinions expressed are however those of the speaker(s) and author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union, nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
Speaker: Elyse Semerdjian (Clark University), Chair: Veronika Zablotsky (Freie Universität Berlin)
Elyse Semerdjian is Robert Aram and Marianne Kaloosdian and Stephen and Marian Mugar Chair of Armenian Genocide Studies at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University and author of Remnants: Embodied Archives of the Armenian Genocide (Stanford University Press, 2023).
Veronika Zablotsky is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Philosophy at Freie Universität Berlin and a member of the interdisciplinary consortium Transforming Solidarities: Praktiken und Infrastrukturen in der Migrationsgesellschaft. Her scholarship explores postcolonial and feminist perspectives in political theory, critical migration studies, and Armenian diaspora studies. She co-founded the Critical Armenian Studies Collective at the University of Pennsylvania and completed her dissertation in Feminist Studies with notations in Critical Race & Ethnic Studies, Politics and History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
The event will take place in a hybrid format on site at Café Arakil
(address: Hermannstraße 86, 12051 Berlin-Neukölln) and via Zoom.
