The third day of Unlearning Maps: Each Small Candle Lights a Corner of the Dark begins in Artsakh with
Black Back Artsakh, a journey through different layers of time, memory, and testimony. We continue with a collective reading on Denialist Futurity, reflecting on genocide, denial, and the futures they attempt to erase.
Lola Lieven
Saturday 11.07.2026
15:00-19:00
Chapter Three
Denialist Futurity
14:30 Doors Open
15:00 - 15:15 Introduction and Recap
15:15 - 17:45 Film Screening:
Black Back Artsakh by Ayreen Anastas, Rene Gabri
17:45 - 18:30 Dinner
18:30 - 19:00 Reading:
Denialist Futurity by Ayreen Anastas, Rene Gabri
Each small candle lights a corner of the dark.
TICKETS Each ticket will go to the fundraiser. This gathering is about (un)learning together. If you cannot afford the ticket, please come by, and we will figure it out together.
FUNDRAISER LINK
or
HERE
If you cannot attend the event, but would like to donate, you can use the link above.
Black Back Artsakh
dir.
Anastas and Rene Gabri
/ 2021 / AM / 150’ / Armenian and English w/ EN subs
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The film is based on interviews with inhabitants of Nagorno-Karabakh made in 2007, in a time between two wars. As in their earlier works shown in Forum Expanded, Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri work with different layers of time: In the past they edited and presented their films live. Here they use the temporal distance to re-evaluate old footage.
Black Bach Artsakh is the name of a world. It lives in and as a film. Those who view it not only inhabit it, but also care for it, keep it alive by keeping watch over it. In this way, it is not a film which so much resists the makers of war and those who deny and continue to justify genocide: it is a film which outlives them.
If film is a document, then it bears witness to a place and a time. For example: This film re-members events from a place called Artsakh in the year 2007—a middle point—exactly 13 years after the 1994 cessation of hostilities in the struggle for liberation and self-determination by Nagorno-Karabakh’s Armenian inhabitants, and 13 years before the 2020 invasion by Azerbaijan’s dictator, who enlisted Turkey’s military and several thousand mercenaries from Syria to conquer those same lands as his country’s sovereign domain.
Then film as a testament, which this film claims affinity with, is what unsettles the domain or reign of any sovereign or sovereignty. It inhabits a time, which is neither the linear one of history nor the make-believe one of fiction: but what some refer to as that of the eternal. For this, and rightly so, Johann Sebastian Bach has been assigned as its honorary composer.
Collective reading: Denialistic Futurity
Text by Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri
This text and the concept of genocidal-denialist futurity has been developed initially as a way to confront Azerbaijan’s brutal invasion and ethnic cleansing of the Armenians of Artsakh, with the most recent invasion of September 19-20 2023. These genocidal acts have been perpetrated by Azerbaijan with the direct military support of Turkey and Israel. Turkey and Azerbaijan are autocratic regimes who are both based on the denial of the genocide their ancestors have perpetrated against Armenians.
