Her Voice: Behind Armenian Lullabies
Lucia Kagramanyan
Event
5 November 2024
5:30 – 7 pm
Framer Framed
Online
Curator: League of Tenders
The world’s earliest archives or libraries were the memories of women. Patiently transmitted from mouth to ear, body to body, hand to hand.
– Trinh T. Minh-Ha. Woman, Native, Other
Her Voice was part of Vleeshal’s International Nomadic Program 2024-2025 Repetition is a Form of Changing organized by League of Tenders. It continued the First Season of the program Her Right devoted to decolonial approaches to feminism and questioning it from non-western perspectives.
In Her Voice, artist and sound researcher Lucia Kagramanyan explored the rich tradition of Armenian lullabies to show how women’s voices could be a powerful tool for knowledge production and its intergenerational transmission, even if the names of thousands and thousands of these women are unknown.
The project unfolded in several parts — a special NTS Radio program (available here), a listening session and a talk by Lucia Kagramanyan at Framer Framed in Amsterdam on November 5 at 6:30pm, and a special research program on Radio Alhara coming in December 2025.
For her project, Lucia Kagramanyan focused on field research and explored archives of Armenian record labels. She collected lullabies from all over Armenia, including those sung in her friends’ families, and asked her own mother, musician Anna Vardazaryan, to perform a lullaby written by her grandmother Ivetta Aznaurova. Kagramanyan also refers to various sources of classical and popular Armenian music, from the legacy of Komitas Vardapet, a composer and priest who was the first to research and preserve the Armenian lullaby tradition, to Soviet musicians as the world-famous Aram Khachaturian and Arno Babajanian as well as the less represented Gevorg Armenyan and Emma Mihranyan.
When it comes to the institutionalization of the oral tradition of lullabies, the composers and singers are predominantly male, while the voices that initially performed them are mainly female. Typically sung by mothers to soothe their children, lullabies represent the first intimate musical experience in a person’s life. The Armenian lullabies that are collected by Kagramanyan reflect the complexity of the tradition which combines melodic chants and simple rhymes with myths, legends and tellings of personal and collective grief. Thus, these songs not only help to establish emotional bonds through sound, words, and touch but also form an integral part of oral history and cultural memory of the people — mostly produced by women in a non-didactic, healing way.
Istanbul-based Armenian researcher Melissa Bilal writes that “this somatic memory of the lullaby makes it reach beyond the skin. The memory of the lullaby is inter-bodily and thus, social and political.” Bilal explores how lullabies became reserves of memory on genocide in Armenian communities in Turkey. Bilal describes how “these songs mediated memory at different levels, by connecting a woman to her past experience, by bonding generations within a family, or by generating a sense of belonging to a collective history.”
Women's role in history, in resistance to oppression — as well as in the history of music — is often obscure. Nevertheless, the everyday work of raising children and transmitting collective memory, culture and language is not only fundamental for the political struggles but also for the healing process Lullabies that are nowadays sung by Armenian mothers enable the interweaving of people's struggles, sorrows, and joys across generations and national boundaries. In her project, Kagramanyan seeks to return the legacy of the women who created such an abundant and complex tradition — the legacy, which is an integral part of history, unlike their names.
Lucia Kagramanyan is a Vienna-based artist and DJ, also known as the host of the NTS radio show Panorama Yerevan, which is showcasing Armenian music in its huge variety. Kagramanyan is researching Armenian music and making it accessible via one-hour episodes that focus either on different genres or moods, mixing old and new recordings. She is also a resident at Radio Alhara, where she is hosting a monthly late-night show every first Tuesday of the month. Kagramanyan is currently studying fine arts and critical studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.
Partners:
NTS Radio is an online global radio platform providing curious minds with a home for music discovery. Built by music lovers, for music lovers. Broadcasting music from over 80 cities around the globe, NTS platforms artists through radio and creative projects.
Radio Alhara is a Palestinian online radio station broadcasting from Bethlehem since its launch in March 2020.
Framer Framed is a platform for contemporary art, visual culture, and critical theory and practice. Each year the organisation presents a variety of exhibitions alongside diverse cultural and educational programs at its main location in Amsterdam Oost, as well as its project space Werkplaats Molenwijk in Amsterdam Noord.
Series
In 2015 Vleeshal kicked of its Nomadic Program, as an extension of its existing exhibition program in Middelburg. In its Nomadic Program Vleeshal goes on tour, organising exhibitions and other events in collaboration with venues in the Netherlands and abroad, such as Art Rotterdam, Amsterdam Art Weekend, the Spring Performance Festival, WIELS Art Book Fair, Brussels and Poppositions, Brussels.
Repetition is a Form of Changing is a program developed by the new curators for Vleeshal’s Nomadic Program 2024-2025: Maria Sarycheva and Elena Ishchenko who form the curatorial duo League of Tenders.
League of Tenders envisions Repetition is a Form of Changing as a collective attempt at rehearsing and practicing non-imperial and anti-colonial ideals. The program consists of Four Seasons. For each Season, League of Tenders will invite non-Western artists, musicians, filmmakers, and choreographers to approach and repeat one of Vleeshal’s previous projects and question the (western) knowledge behind feminism, language, ecology, and care. They will revisit these concepts and discuss them from their own perspectives. By placing these concepts in underrepresented international art contexts, League of Tenders proposes new perspectives and enacts the necessary process of changing. This collective rehearsal will be approached from the perspectives of Indigenous people reconnecting with their cultures, colonized people resisting colonial oppression, and displaced individuals searching for a home beyond their homeland. Repetition is a Form of Changing will extend beyond state borders, encompassing localities such as Idel-Ural, North and South Caucasus, and Central and Northern Asia. Various independent initiatives and collectives based in these locations will join League of Tenders during the events of Vleeshal’s Nomadic Program 2024-2025 in order to spark and support translocal networks of solidarity.
League of Tenders is an imaginary organization and curatorial duo established in 2018 by curators, researchers, and friends Elena Ishchenko and Maria Sarycheva aimed at cultivating collectivities and fostering the affective dynamics within them. Over time, League of Tenders has focused on disability representation, overcoming the alienation of everyday labor, practices of care, support, and friendship in the age of disasters. Their projects disrupt traditional forms, seeking to place concepts, people, and artworks in unexpected contexts and inviting them to engage in dialogue. The duo has been appointed as Vleeshal's nomadic curators for Vleeshal's Nomadic Program 2024-2025.
Elena Ishchenko is a curator, researcher and, activist. In her practice, Elena Ishchenko is nurturing a decolonial approach to curating and knowledge production, while addressing power relations inherited from colonial policies, particularly within the russian* context. She has worked as a curator at the Typography Center for Contemporary Art (Krasnodar, russia), a researcher at the Garage Museum (Moscow, russia), and has developed exhibitions, educational initiatives, workshops, and other projects in russia, Germany, Armenia, Switzerland, among others. Her recent projects include Өмә (nGbK, Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Berlin, 2023), an exhibition that represented the complexity of russia as a colonial realm through stories of artists of Indigenous, migrant, and racialized backgrounds, and Translocal Dialogues (online, 2022), which sought to weave solidarity networks by inviting cultural workers from various contexts to share their experiences, thoughts and feelings on wars, decolonial possibilities, forced migration, and state violence.
Elena is based in Cologne, Germany.
Maria Sarycheva was born in Ufa, Bashqortostan. From 2012 until 2023, she worked independently as a curator and educator in various regions of russia. In 2015, she initiated the Department of Inclusive Programs at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art. In 2019, she established the Department of Access and Inclusion at the State Tretyakov Gallery and served as its Head until March 2023. Besides dealing with architectural barriers, she was also responsible for the accessibility of museum content and collection for blind people and people with low vision; D/deaf and hard of hearing community; and for visitors with diverse developmental and learning disabilities.
Currently, Maria lives as a nomad, wandering somewhere between Berlin and Bashqortostan. Her research interests include care, feminist theory and practice, and disability history.
*League of Tenders uses “russia” and “russian” in lowercase to condemn the war against Ukraine unleashed by russia and its policy in general, and to express solidarity with Ukrainians and the participants of decolonial movements.