The Armenian Culture Kit (2017)
“The Armenian Culture Kit” is a speculative time capsule—an assemblage of discursive fragments that maps Armenian national identity and cultural memory through a sociomaterial lens. Inspired by the ethos of Fluxkits, it operates as a cultural probe designed to spark dialogue, preserve memory, and invite collaborative engagement with Armenian heritage.
Encased in a handcrafted wooden box, the kit contains Hishatakaran, a reflective book, alongside an eclectic pastiche of Armenian literature (poems, proverbs), mythology (origin stories, gods, heroes), symbolic geographies (lost lands, ancestral sites), and expressions of art, food, dance, music, opera, and history. Factual and fictional narratives intertwine with tactile objects to activate cultural memory and sensory knowledge.
Rather than envisioning alternative futures, the project foregrounds the present—offering an open-source, living archive that invites both personal and collective participation. It allows diasporic Armenians to reconnect with overlooked or forgotten layers of their identity, while also introducing non-Armenians to the depth of an ancient culture dispersed across borders.
By gathering these fragments into one container, The Armenian Culture Kit becomes a prompt for cultural continuity—a tactile invitation to reflect, remember, and contribute to the evolving story of Armenian identity.
What is a Hishatakaran?
The Hishatakaran, literally meaning “memoir” or “memorial” in Armenian, was both a literary genre and a cultural preservation tool dating back to the 5th century. These manuscripts documented individual and communal histories, sociopolitical events, religious texts, and eyewitness accounts—serving as vessels of national memory. Reflective of Armenians’ temporal self-understanding, they often included not just dates and places, but also personal interpretations of historical events, much like colophons (Guerigian, 2010).
Inspired by this tradition, I decided to design a book that would mediate different aspects of Armenian symbolic thought. This book became an integral part of the Armenian Culture Kit, functioning as a linguistic materialization of Armenian cultural histories. It became a way for me to unravel the layered construction of Armenian identity, histories, and practices through both textual and visual storytelling. Rather than replicate a chronological sequence of historical events, I embraced a nonlinear structure—oscillating between the factual and the anecdotal—to tell national and personal stories as a poeticized interpretation of Armenian culture, told by a disaporic Armenian.
Armenian Matters of Concern
Driven by a desire to gather patterns of knowledge that evoke, as Bateson describes, “the stuff of culture, or the bits of culture, or the feel of culture” (Bateson, 1987), This project acts two guiding questions: What is the nation for diasporic Armenians? And what constitutes Armenian culture?