Tag: maria gunko

The surroundings of the Kobayr Monastery are a contrast between the eternal and the fleeting, the essence and the image, serenity and mundane chaos. Maria Gunko’s story is a patchwork of two places and one character who seemingly dwells between them, making a life from what’s available.

In commemoration of renowned Armenian poet Yeghishe Charents, Maria Gunko delves into his colorful universe to see how it captures the essence of Armenia's landscapes and geography, drawing parallels with her perceptions.

In trying to understand her assumptions of her position as a researcher, and the spaces she could access, Maria Gunko uncovered that it was not her ethnicity that informed how she was perceived on the field site, but rather the explosive mixture of her gender and ethnicity.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union created vast areas of abandonment and no-go zones that froze in time. In this next essay in the “Outside In” series, Maria Gunko writes that until the material relics of the Soviet Union disappear for good, we are deemed to revisit them, provoking thoughts about what societies value, how they evolve and what they leave behind.

Following the story of Dastakert, Armenia’s smallest city, this next essay in the “Outside In” series looks behind the veil of yet another small Armenian city and offers a glimpse into the lives of its “void dwellers”, namely Siranush.

Once an agricultural settlement, tidily inscribed into the picturesque mountain landscape, Dastakert was remade by the Soviet state into a site of copper-molybdenum extractivism. That project failed. What happened to the city?

Fences made from radiators are a powerful symbolic and tangible point of inquiry into the entangled history of Armenia's (de)modernization, which is linked to the dynamics of colonialism and independence, as well as the different state practices in the making.