Armenian Intermediality in the Event-Space: Spatial Performativity and Sound in the Other Milanese Avant-Garde

The avant-garde has long been a genre where intermediality plays a central role, and the Milanese movement presents an excellent example. Despite their political and aesthetic significance, the works of minoritarian artists and their complex engagements with sound and music within intermedial projects have not received the attention they deserve in the literature on the Milanese avant-garde. This is particularly true for Armenian artists. In 1977, Herman Vahramian and Ludwig Bazil staged the intermedial project Ararat at the Milanese church of San Maurizio. The performance incorporated music, poetry, and painting. The church’s historical, artistic, and ritualistic connotations and physical spaces facilitated this total-art endeavor and contextualized it within the broader cultural landscape of Milan at the time. As a post-Genocide performance, Ararat’s experimentation with temporality, trauma, and utopianism reflected the abjected Armenian community’s efforts to negotiate the politics of identification and belonging. My presentation explores how minoritarian artists have created anti-hierarchical amalgamations of artistic forms in their attempts to intervene in communitarian politics. I discuss how the performativity of the event-space supported the intermedial aesthetics of the performance, and enabled sonic dialogues that challenged the hegemonic formulations of history while promoting alternative visions regarding the future.