What is Abastan?
Abastan is a creative community situated in the town of Tumanyan amidst the mountains of Northern Armenia. Our mission is to nurture and spread a “something-out-of-nothing” approach to creativity as a form of making and being.
We believe that creativity is not a luxury or profession but a way of relating to materials and places and not a rare talent but a basic human skill. From paper and clay, old machinery and plastic bags, hay, stones, and broken furniture, we create artworks, everyday objects, shared experiences, and new kinds of spaces. Our vision is rooted in low-waste, low-cost, and contextual forms of making: we work with what we have, not what we buy. In a world shaped by consumption, we choose creative transformation.
What Do We Do?
Learning and Creating Together
We organize hands-on workshops and courses where children, youth, and adults learn to create with what’s at hand. From crafting musical instruments and toys to designing useful everyday objects, participants explore practical skills while discovering new ways of thinking about materials, waste, and art. Abastan is also a gathering place for artists and makers who spend time with us while pursuing their own projects. There’s always room for new people, spontaneous ideas, and surprising collaborations!
Nurturing a Community
Abastan is not a rigid institution but a community based on trust, friendship, and generosity. We not only work together but also have fun. Together, we create an environment of playfulness where all feel safe to try and fail and where people from around the world can find solace in turbulent times.
Transforming Ordinary Spaces into Places of Creativity
We organize exhibitions, theater and music performances in homes, gardens, bus stops, and other everyday spaces, showing creativity shouldn’t be confined to formal cultural institutions.
Caring for the Environment
We practice low-waste living and encourage a deeper connection to the local environment. In our work, we draw on materials from our surroundings: we shape ceramics from local clay, make pigments from soils, stones, and plants, and design paper with dried plants we collect. We cultivate gardens, encourage respect for local ecosystems, regularly take stray dogs for vaccination and medical treatment and actively promote humane treatment of all animals.
Placemaking Through Stories and Art
We gather oral histories, everyday objects, and old ephemera that capture the past and present meanings of place. We turn to them in our creative projects, making the many layers of local history visible again and nurturing a common sense of place.
Supporting Local Small-Scale Economy
We support local livelihoods, especially women running hospitality micro-businesses, by helping attract visitors, buying dairy, produce, and honey directly from small-scale producers, inviting them to share their skills, and offering volunteer labor when help is needed.
Our goal is to grow Abastan into a lasting presence and a point of connection for creative and civic-minded initiatives across the region. To achieve long-term sustainability, in 2025 we are raising funds to establish Abastan House – a small village home that will serve as our permanent base. Having our own home will allow us to run workshops year-round, host international volunteers, build lasting mentorships with local youth, and welcome visitors beyond the brief span of individual events. It will also provide a secure place to store and display our tools, materials, and artworks, making our work more accessible and visible to the community.
Our history and vision
Abastan was born in 2022 with an ambitious vision: to create an international art residency in a former school-factory building in Tumanyan. The name, inspired by the Armenian word for refuge, reflected our hope to build a space for focused creative work and a respite from the stress of urban life. But as more than a hundred volunteers took part in the first season, bringing endless love and imagination to the strenuous tasks of cleaning, repairing, salvaging, and remaking, we began to realize that what was taking shape wasn’t a conventional institution.
The process itself called for something more open, collaborative, and responsive.
What emerged was a community project, co-curated by a very diverse group of people, including painters and photographers, filmmakers and animators, musicians, dancers, theater performers, textile artists and sculptors, historians, anthropologists, environmental activists, and many others. The meaning of Abastan shifted too, becoming less about a place and more about shared time, mutual learning, and the energy of doing things together. Many who have spent time here remain involved from afar, continuing to support the community as it grows.
It wasn’t only the work that reshaped the project but also the place itself. Tumanyan has become a generous home, even as we remain newcomers here. Being “here” for us means engaging with its many layers – its landscape and built environment, its ancient past, its rise as a twentieth-century industrial center, and the long aftermath of deindustrialization, with all the difficulties and everyday forms of resilience it produced. This engagement is a responsibility: to listen, to learn, and to find ways, however small, to contribute in return.
Our “something-out-of-nothing” approach to creativity and art has grown directly from the context of Tumanyan. A conventional art residency, with its predictable formats, high resource demands, and social exclusivity, would have created an incongruous and ethically fraught presence here. Instead, the constraints of the place have pushed us toward a more honest and situated creative practice. They’ve challenged us to question assumptions about what art should look like, where it should happen, and who it’s for. Our experience has led us to believe that geographically and economically marginalized places like this one not only stand to benefit from creative projects; they also expand the terms of creativity itself, inspiring ways of working free from the commercial pressures and cultural hierarchies that dominate urban art scenes.
The activities of Abastan Community are supported by Abastan NGO, a non-governmental not-for-profit organization registered in Armenia in 2022.
