Armenian Spatial Imaginaries (2018)

“Armenian Spatial Imaginaries” reflects on the current entangled understanding of the Armenian geopolitical dilemma. Armenian spatiality has evolved toward an unsettling, fragmented sense of homeland—where the present-day Republic of Armenia represents only a small portion of historic Armenian lands. For centuries, the lack of cohesive consensus around territorial claims has necessitated new narratives to imagine a geography of justice.

This project asks: What designerly means can redefine Armenians’ relationship to geopolitical realities? How can embroidery evoke a multilayered Armenian sense of place—beyond geographic coordinates? And how might design instigate cultural discourse around territorial claims and indigenous rights?

Through the lens of critical materiality, I explore how thought can be translated into thread to convey emotional diasporic knowledge. Using design fictions, I construct alternative spatial narratives that conjure Armenian landscapes imbued with nostalgic memory—mountains, valleys, rivers, people, and animals etched into diasporic consciousness as fragments of a lost homeland. The resulting work envisions a spatial continuum: a virtual, imagined terrain where transnational Armenian identity unfolds. Drawing from ecosophy—as Guattari describes it, the “ethico-political articulation” of environmental, social, and subjective registers—this embroidered landscape emerges from my own visual archive: a collage of photographs taken during my travels, layered into a stitched topography of longing and imagined return.

Suspended between the present-day reality of genocide denial and the hope for future resolution, Armenian Spatial Imaginaries offers a quiet, tactile form of resistance—one that maps belonging across memory, thread, and place.