A music-driven project exploring the diverse vocalities of the global Armenian experience.

1001 Voices is a contemporary Western Armenian music project dedicated to the creation, performance, and transnational circulation of original musical works. The project explores how Western Armenian can function as a sonic medium within hybrid composition, participatory laboratories, and community-based musical engagement.

The project will result in the composition of five new original works in Western Armenian. These works will be based on newly written or creatively translated contemporary texts, addressing global themes such as migration, digital alienation, ecological anxiety, and fragmented identities.

A compendium in which each contribution proposes an experimental school for translating and practicing Western Armenian.

A publication that will gather a collection of syllabi, project packets, workbooks, and more wherein each contribution offers a distinct interpretation of a lesson plan using their research findings as their source material. Contributors will be partnered with archives, institutions, translators or organizations of their choosing, to have means and extensive time to dive deep into material. Translation is an activity that reveals the complexity of language, and publications give a tangible platform to work through and process that very complexity.

Inspired by the breadth of translation processes, the goal is to continue to demonstrate the myriad ways translation, thus also practicing Western Armenian, can happen. Showing that language is multi-layered and comes with depths of etymologies, societal histories, and personal meaning held behind words.

A cinematic portrait of the renowned contemporary artist Anna Boghiguian, whose work has significantly shaped the discourse around identity, memory, materiality, and cultural continuity in contemporary art.

A challenging and pioneering project in its effort to translate a complex and intellectually rigorous artistic practice into a compelling cinematic narrative. It is educational in its commitment to contextualize the artist’s work within both Armenian and global contemporary art histories, and celebratory in honouring a living cultural figure whose influence transcends national boundaries.

The film will combine high-resolution cinematography, archival materials, studio footage, exhibition documentation, and in-depth interviews with the artist, curators, scholars, and collaborators. Through a carefully crafted visual language, it will trace both the creative process and the intellectual foundations of the artist’s practice, situating her work within broader cultural and historical contexts.

A project capturing the unique sonic landscape and musical heritage of the Armenian community in Lebanon.

The film will document Beirut’s musical trajectory and legacy as it explores how art and language reflect their times, and how historical, political, and economic forces, in turn, shape artistic direction and expression.

As a vital home for the Armenian people after the Genocide, Lebanon is captured as the place of remarkable cultural and musical awakening, a place where the history of Armenians unfolds alongside that of the Lebanese state: formation, growth, flourishing, crisis, and the ongoing pursuit of renewal. By the1960s-70s, alongside the cultural renaissance and revival, Western Armenian itself sees a great revitalization, and a musical awakening shapes itself where new studios are built, bands are formed, people experiment with sound, and create a vibrant musical scene that extended far beyond traditional forms. Lebanese-Armenian musicians move between Armenian folklore, Arabic, and other Middle Eastern music, as well as the latest international trends. This documentary is driven by the desire to explore that artistic world and bring it back into the Armenian cultural conversation.

Otaperig | Օդաբերիկ (“brings through the air”) is an imaginary օդապարիկ (hot air balloon) that travels the world to bring fresh stories and perspectives to Western Armenian linguistic expression. 

The two-part project will first feature a docufictional series called «Վառվռե՞մ կամ ձգձգե՞մ» (shall I ignite it or procrastinate it?) using archives, photographs, letters, oral histories, and stories told within intimate circles to document stories from Armenian communities worldwide and bring them to Bourj-Hammoud (the Armenian town adjacent to Beirut) to be told. 

The second component is «Լուրիկ-բերիկ» (bringing news), which will collect news from the daily lives of different Armenian communities. Like a perceptive and shrewd radio broadcast, it will share stories from the diaspora that merge fictional and factual elements. Highlighting the mundane within the quotidian lives of different Armenian communities and their internal dynamics, this programme will use stop-motion animation to present these stories visually through short videos.

An impressionistic essay film that looks at how environments and the spaces we inhabit shape perception, behavior and experience.

The project explores the fragile yet persistent relationship between language, place and identity, asking how belonging is formed, fractured and reimagined through movement. It questions how language carries memory across territories, how identity breathes differently depending on the spaces it inhabits and how culture evolves both within its native land and in Diaspora. Language is treated as a living entity, a vessel of history, emotion and collective memory. Languages do not exist in isolation; they depend on ecosystems. What happens when a language is removed from its geographical roots? How does it endure, transform or erode in unfamiliar contexts? The work explores the tension between preservation and change and between attachment to the past and ongoing reinvention.

This hybrid essay film which unfolds across two resonant spaces: Montreal and Armenia, approaches language through the lens of psychogeography to understand how language survives when separated from stable geography and how it reshapes identity across time and place. 

A poignant look at the layers of displacement and the resilience of identity.

A 52-minute documentary film about Armenian families from the Rhône Valley in France (Décines, Valence, Vienne) who took part in the repatriation movements to Soviet Armenia during the campaigns of 1936 and 1947. The documentary consists of interviews with descendants of these families in France and Armenia. Through their stories, the film will explore the experience of repatriation, the hopes that motivated the departures, the difficulties encountered in Soviet Armenia, and the long-term consequences of these events on identity, family memory, and language.

A central focus of the film will be on the evolution of the Western Armenian language. In some cases, the original language was preserved, in others it was gradually transformed or even lost. Using interviews, historical and personal archives, as well as key testimonies, the main result will be a documentary film in both French and Western Armenian, with the filmed interviews constituting a small oral history archive.

An experimental investigation of the book as a medium for understanding Diaspora and multilingualism.

A multilingual, experimental book based on the eponymous Western Armenian text by Krikor Beledian. The project combines selected fragments and essayistic reflections on Diaspora and multilingualism with photographic work. As an artistic and critical object, «Լեզուներ» (languages) uses the book itself as a medium to explore linguistic coexistence, translation, and diasporic experience.

Selected fragments will be presented alongside their translations, where translation is treated as a material and conceptual element, not a secondary process, while the photographic work engages with spaces, traces, and material signs of Diaspora and multilingual existence. Images function as visual fragments, echoing the textual structure and forming a parallel, non-verbal language within the book.

An immersive, multisensory exhibition and accompanying website exploring intergenerational Armenian identity through Western Armenian as a language of nurture, survival, and belonging. The work is rooted in personal and family stories, weaving them through visual art, writing, audio, and archival materials.

Tracing how identity reorganizes as contexts shift, the project invites reflection on how language shapes identity, memory, ancestry, and cultural connection as lived, embodied experience, and reveals how personal histories are carried, shared, and reshaped across time and place. Attending to layered experiences and fragmentation, Western Armenian functions as a connective tissue across countries and generations, holding language as both home and bridge. These intimate narratives are translated into sensory, spatial, and digital forms, through which the project merges contemporary art practice with cultural preservation.

A noir dance film trilogy that translates the visceral power of Western Armenian poetry into movement and shadow.

“Embodied Language” is an interdisciplinary cultural production project that will create three short dance films in cinematic noir style, each inspired by the poetry of a major Western Armenian poet. The films will reinterpret classical Western Armenian poetry through contemporary dance, cinema aesthetics, and experimental sound design, using Armenian as the language of narration and textual presence.

Employing film noir aesthetics will bring shadow, fragmentation, contrast, moral ambiguity, and psychological tension, elements that can help address contemporary themes like identity, exile, memory, and belonging while strongly resonating with the Western Armenian historical and contemporary condition: genocide, forced displacement, layered identity, memory, and survival. By combining classical Western Armenian poetry, contemporary choreography, cinematic noir aesthetics and youth-centered audio-visual production the project transforms literary heritage into living embodied culture.