Photographs by Ara Oshagan, Text by Micheline Aharonian Marcom
2025
In September 2024, the indigenous Armenian region of Artsakh was violently invaded by the authoritarian dictatorship of Azerbaijan and its Armenian population displaced from its ancestral homeland. Over 3000-year presence on indigenous lands came to an end overnight.
What Can I Tell You, We Lost Everything combines photography and testimony to consider the before and afterlives of this violent displacement of Armenian communities. A collaboration between two diasporan artists—a novelist and a visual artist—whose ancestors survived the extreme violence of the Armenian Genocide of 1915 nearly 100 years ago, this series is a documentation and a speculation. It is present at a critical moment in history to record the visuals and experiences of these communities. What will happen to these families? Will they end up in Los Angeles or Rome or Helsinki or Buenos Aires or Bangkok? Or back in their homeland?
The histories of displacement and inherited memory of the artists are entangled in the construction of this deeply personal as well as collective narrative.
