A meeting with Verena von Beckerat within the  “Architectural Meetings” initiative of the Youth Club of the Union of Architects

03.09.2012

Narek Sargsyan shares his own personal vision of the future of Yerevan and presents the activities of the organization founded by him.

15.03.2012, Cafesjian Art Center

Is it possible to “rehabilitate” a capital which is caught between an utopia and the reality. This question hides in itself the issue of heritage, and not only hides it but also changes its definition.

Indeed, if we do not attribute to heritage the function of selecting what should be preserved and what should be ruined but rather assign to it the function of “rehistorizing” the  material and symbolic reality, in this case only New Belgrade might be able to acquire a meaning corresponding to its history.

By “rehistorizing” we mean embracing  “the history of your history”. This sphere not only concerns historians but also any citizen and family. To revalue urban areas does not entail being content with cleaning up the dust of history from the frontages of buildings and modernizing them. It rather means returning the area to one’s own memory and restoring the dignity of people who came to live there 50 years ago.  It also means accepting the fact that, in the context of large-scale architecture, urban areas teach us a lot about history and our relationship with it. 

The “Sweet 60s” project is a long-term experimental, curatorial, scientific and educational research project that explores the hidden territories of the revolutionary period of the 1960s  from contemporary artistic and theoretical points of view,  developing around itself a wide international network of interested and cooperating individuals and institutions.

The curatorial and artistic focus of the “Sweet 60s” project lies on “post ideological societies” (in post-Soviet, post socialist, Eastern European, Middle Eastern, West and Central Asian as well as North African countries and the second phase in China and Latin America),  making a comparative analysis and contextualizing the historical developments in the art, culture and social life of the 60s – 70s and looking into their influence on the formation of contemporary socio-political and cultural situations.

Ruben Arevshatyan is an artist, art and cultural critic and a free-lance curator. Since 2005, he is member of AICA-Armenia. Between 1997-2004 he was the art director of the Yerevan Hay-Art Center of Arts. He teaches History of Art at the Department of Fine Arts at the Armenian Open University. He has curated and participated in numerous local and international projects and exhibitions. He is the co-author and co-curator of the “Sweet 60s” international research project. Arevshatyan is also the co-editor of the www.red-thread.org electronic periodical.

For more information click here:  www.red-thread.org

The buildings built in the recent years  represent New York’s attempts to contrast the old with the new.  The perspective developments of the capital Yerevan and the question of what kind of city we want to live in in the near and far future are also discussed.

During the conversation, Areg answers the audience’s questions.

Additional information: Areg Asatryan graduated from the Yerevan Polytechnic Institute in 1980 , from the Faculty of Architecture and was mostly involved in restoring cultural and historical monuments. He has been living in New York  for more than 11 years , where he participates in developing plans for high-rise residential and hotel buildings  at the architectural  firm Ismael Leyva Architects.