Desiring the Homeland in Architectural Space: Spatiotemporal Performativity in the Milanese Armenian Avant-Garde

How do diasporic artists integrate architectural interventions in their performances to foster alternative visions for the future among their communities? How do space and time function as intertwined, performative dimensions in such self-enactment projects? I address these questions by examining spatial performativity and temporal politics in an Armenian avant-garde performance that took place in Milan. In 1977, Armenian painter Herman Vahramian and composer Ludwig Bazil staged the intermedial project Ararat at the 16th-century church of San Maurizio in Milan. The performance incorporated music, poetry, and painting. The church’s historical, artistic, and ritualistic connotations, along with its physical spaces, facilitated this total-art endeavor and contextualized it within the broader cultural landscape of Milan at the time. More importantly, Vahramian and Bazil configured the double-spaced architecture, and the religious iconography of Renaissance frescoes, as symbolic bridges between ancestral displacement and renewed aspirations. As such, Ararat connects present diasporic conditions with the vision of a self-determined homeland, at a time when Armenia was still under Soviet rule. Mount Ararat itself—an inescapable biblical reference symbolizing Armenian identity—addresses issues of denied territoriality. Historically linked to the geography of Armenia, it remains, both in the 1970s and now, within the borders of Turkey. By focusing on the relationship among architecture, artistic heritage, and the conceptual and proxemic aspects of the performance, my presentation explores how minoritarian artists have created anti-hierarchical amalgamations of artistic forms in their attempts to intervene in communitarian politics. Through challenging spatial concerns, the Armenian avant-garde in Milan contributed to envisioning autonomous political futures among the diasporic community, drawing on a marginalized narrative that disrupts hegemonic power structures.