Catalogue > Un extrait vidéo au hasard

‘A Passage’ is a film which tackles the political economy and social ecology of border infrastructures in Southern Armenia. By focusing on two significant events that illustrate the dominant political shifts in the region, ‘A Passage’ looks at how processes of rapid militarization and neoliberalization have restructured these borders. These two events include the recent erasure of the historic Yerevan-Baku Railway; and the upcoming construction of an industrial Free Economic Zone (FEZ) planned precisely where the removed train infrastructure was housed. The scrapping of the railway symbolizes the socio-political adherence to maintaining strict mobility regimes for citizens, while the introduction of the FEZ signals how capital supersedes these bodily restrictions and borders. The film stitches together various contested sites of the region including Meghri’s abandoned airport (which is slated to be refurbished as the forward command of Russia’s Middle Eastern operations), a functioning Soviet-era Copper and Molybdenum mine, a 16th century church (which is the last remaining building of a village abandoned by the mines expansion) the abandoned Karchivan and Meghri train stations and an abandoned rail tunnel that bridges the geopolitical boundary of Nakhchivan and Armenia.

Pejvak is an ongoing collaboration between Rouzbeh Akhbari (Tehran, Iran 1992) and Felix Kalmenson (Saint Petersburg, Russia 1987) which began in 2014 in Casablanca, Morocco. Over the past five years they have undertaken large scale exhibition and research projects internationally including at Si Shang Art Museum (Beijing), The Work of Wind produced by Blackwood Gallery (Mississauga), Onsite Gallery (Toronto), State Silk Museum (Tbilisi), ACSL (Yerevan), Les Abattoirs (Casablanca) and Hay Art (Yerevan). They are currently in the post-production phase of their first feature-length film Bring Forth, funded by the Canada Arts Council and the Ontario Arts Council and in the pre-production of our second film The Seed. In addition to being featured in C Magazine, LEAP, Funambulist and Prefix Magazine, they co-authored a book chapter in Unsettling Colonial Modernity in Islamicate Contexts published by Cambridge Scholars and are also contributors to The Work of Wind: Land, K. Verlag Press.