WHAT LEAVES & WHAT LIVES
Tracing the Multiple Pasts of an Armenian School in Istanbul
CSN Lab and D21 Kunstraum Leipzig warmly invite you to the book presentation and public talk of Address: Balat Orphanage as part of the Leipzig International Book Fair.
The event presents a collaboration between CSN Lab and the Cluster of Excellence Temporal Communities at Freie Universität Berlin, which led to the creation of two volumes, Address: Balat Orphanage and Berlin Dialogues, that bring together archival research and literature to explore the complexities of war, conflict and borders through the lenses of memory, migration and spatiality.
The event will feature a conversation with the authors, Tigran Amiryan and Arsen Abrahamyan (CSN Lab), moderated by co-editor Barbara Bausch (Freie Universität Berlin).
Address: Balat Orphanage emerges from CSN Lab’s long-term research on the archives of the Armenian Khorenyan School in Istanbul’s Balat district. The archives were digitised and categorised by the Hrant Dink Foundation and the Balat Foundation, forming the basis for an interdisciplinary study that combines archival investigation, memory studies and spatial analysis. The book traces nearly two centuries of transformations of the Khorenyan School and Orphanage, a place of care that played a pivotal role in Istanbul’s Armenian community and closed its doors in the late 1970s.
Spanning the late Ottoman Empire and early Turkish Republic, the archive reveals the intertwined histories of Armenian, Jewish, and Greek communities and documents the political and social shifts that shaped shared urban spaces and collective memory. By exploring the intertwined processes of forgetting and remembrance, the publication offers insight into a rich body of previously unpublished archival material documenting life before, during and after the Armenian Genocide.
The publication is part of the con·stel·la·tions series, a project of the eponymous hub for networked and transdisciplinary initiatives conceived within the framework of the Cluster of Excellence 2020 “Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective” at Freie Universität Berlin.
