CPOY 76 Documentary Award of Excellence: Along the Closed Borders
I was born in Armenia during the first Nagorno-Karabakh war and now live in the US. When I was little, I used to visit my grandmothers in the village. I played with the neighbor's children, drank spring water, picked flowers, and climbed the mountains to look at our village from above. There, beyond mountains, was the closed border with Azerbaijan. There was also my father's hometown of Artsvashen. It became part of Azerbaijan in 1992, two days after I was born. Rural life in Armenia varies from region to region, but everywhere people survive by farming. In some areas, people harvest fruits, while in others, they tend cattle and sheep. Life in the villages is not only physically demanding. The regions have a high level of unemployment, and a large percentage of the population lives in poverty. In the absence of work, men often leave their families to work in neighboring countries for a portion of the year. Most rural residents are women and children. In 2020, the war in Nagorno-Karabakh reignited. It lasted for 44 days and took the lives of thousands of people, and displaced even more. When the war ended, I began to hear the words "border" and "borderline" everywhere. I heard them in the media, in conversations with my family. I started to think about the meaning of borders and how their proximity affects people's lives and the landscape itself. I traveled Armenia from Bagaran to Chinari, documenting everyday rural life along the closed borders with Azerbaijan and Turkey.
In Chambarak, people built a cross overlooking the village. Many crosses like this appeared within the last decades, especially in rural areas. They are visible from the road and shine only at night. Some locals of Chambarak say that they always drive past this cross first before heading to their homes.
Project Description: I made these images during the final days of college of my daily life and the people I love to encapsulate our last moments. Together, over these four years, we helped each other become ourselves. Through messiness, depression, sexual exploration, loss, breakups, and a pandemic we found love and safety. And yet a single exposure could isolate us from each other for two weeks — two weeks from what already felt like limited time. There were moments of hungover bagels, dancing to musicals and getting high to watch reality TV. Then there were other moments where we were so deep into our drama where every small annoyance, a pile of dirty dishes and the unsolvable ant infestation, on top of our general pandemic and senior year anxiety, felt like a great reckoning. Our classes, meals, parties and jobs all happened from home. We cherished and reminisced loudly as we grumbled and gossiped quietly. There were no grandiose final week events or class-wide celebrations. It was all small moments with the same small groups. And then in a final breathless sprint, it was all over. Now we wake up once again scattered all across the United States in homes and with families who for as earnestly as they may try don't understand nor accept who we are becoming. Here I am trying to create a sense of closure in a chapter of my life that didn’t go the way I expected it to.
