Mehdi's analog photolab& exhibition

Abastan is a community of artists in Tumanyan, a small post-industrial town in northern Armenia. The project took off in 2022 when migrant artists who came to Armenia in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine were offered to turn the space of a former school/textile factory into a residency, studios, and workshops. In the following year they were joined by Iranian, Armenian and international artists and volunteers. Having met there for the first time, all taken out of their familiar environments, these people were striving to understand each other, build a community and forge their artistic paths, while struggling to keep the dilapidated building alive, facing uncertainties of the future, and coming to terms with their strange position as guests-or-intruders of Tumanyan. In my photo project, I wanted to capture the spirit of this unique community and find a visual language to depict its members’ search for the “I” and the “we” in common work, the difficulty and the hard work of building a community, reflected metaphorically in the difficulty and the hard work required for maintaining the beautiful but decaying building in which the community created its home. The photos were shot on film and printed using expired photo paper.

1. Factory
the story of a building as a mirror and an interlocutor of a maturing community
As one part of the project, I first took a series of portraits of the building itself. In our evolving ways of seeing this building and our relationship with it I saw a metaphor of the evolution and maturing of the community itself. First there was a romantic infatuation at the sight of a beautiful “abandoned” building. We began to clean and repair it, feeling inspired by a mission to revive. Then we encountered the walls – the walls that preserved memories of the people who came there as school children and worked there when the school building was turned into a textile factory. Facing the walls, we began to question who we were and why we got to be the stewards of this place while the people of the community whose memories it preserved were banished from it after the building was transformed from a public space to “private property” in the 1990s and sold. What once had been a seductive sight of beautiful desolation became a testimony of personal loss of people whom we were beginning to know better. “Locals” acquired faces, names, and stories. The factory could no longer be simply “our home.” And then came the roof – the ultimate symbol of security and home. The old roof of the building was deteriorating, and the top floor of the building was flooded after every rain. The attempt to save the roof brought a new wave of inspiration. Some worked tirelessly on the attic, patching the roof and reinforcing the beams. Others tried to raise funds for repairs. The water kept seeping in, however, producing rifts and sobering realizations. If we raise money for the repairs, how can we guarantee that we will not be asked to leave the building in a year or two to be replaced by a more profitable enterprise? Are we really “stewards”? Is this really our home? Are we not being simply used by our landlord? Why give our labor and our love to this place? The story of love turned into one of disenchantment, and disenchantment sparked self-search. Who are we? Can Abastan exist without its mission to restore and reflect on the past through the factory building?