Collaboration
collectives, curation, anthologies
The Brighter I Shine
written by Kamee Abrahamian, illustrated by Lusine Ghukasyan, published by Lantana
For one Armenian child, birthdays are a time for decorating the house with bunches of rose and mint and sumac, for eating beef dumplings with garlic yoghurt, and for baking cakes with family and friends. But birthdays are also a time for telling stories – stories of ancestors and homelands, of births and new beginnings, and of the land their family now calls home. For stories make up who we are, and the more stories that are told, the brighter this little child shines. A magical tale about finding yourself in the stories of your ancestors and keeping their memories alive.
Amnesty International endorses this book as it shows how the treasures of ancestors can live on for a child of refugees.
*** A Guardian Best Book of the Month 2024 ***
***Shortlisted for IBC (Inclusive Books for Children) Award***
*** Children’s Book Council Hot Off the Press October 2024 ***
***The Bookseller Top Pick for December 2024***
“A colourful, poignant picture book about treasuring the stories of those who came before.”
– The Guardian
“This is a story that speaks of how important it is for our own sense of identity to keep alive the family stories we grow up with – and speaks to us about our roots and how we must tend them throughout our lives.”
– Terry Potter for Letterpress Project
“…the first picturebook I’ve encountered that centres specifically on Armenian heritage and culture… A tender picturebook which also addresses the role that storytelling plays in keeping histories alive.”
– Phoebe Demeger for CLPE
“…yet another brilliant example of Lantana covering themes which you would be hard pressed to find in many other children’s books.”
– Spy Readers
“An Armenian child of refugees muses on ancestral stories as vehicles of connection and identity in this moving picture book.”
– Foreword Reviews, STARRED
“…a beautifully engaging story… underlining the value and importance of drawing strength from stories of any family’s history.”
– Eve Bearne for Just Imagine
“This message is both timely and timeless… Every page is filled with memories, stars, and images of loved ones that make you feel warm and hopeful.”
– Inclusive Children’s Books
FLESH, IMMEMORIAL
Flesh Immemorial is a creative experiment in the undoing of absence, a kaleidoscopic super(im)position of queer and/or feminist Western Armenian activists onto their home-landscapes of origin. These mixed-media monuments are radical interventions of place and land from which they descend but may not have access to.
Museum of Forgotten Artifacts
The Museum of Forgotten Artifacts is an installation that collects and exhibits objects from our past or ancestral artifacts that we have lost or don’t have in our possession (anymore) – specific to the SWANA region. The project is a participatory collaboration and it is curated and facilitated by Kamee Abrahamian and illustrated by Knar Hovakimyan.
Our intention is to explore the spiritual and temporal qualities of physical/material belongings, and the sense of belonging they might evoke for both participants and audiences with their shared and respective ancestral lands, histories, and memory. This allows us to dream up stories of the places we have never been but still feel like we belong to. It invites us to imagine into the everyday lives of our ancestors that we are out of touch with, the histories and memories that feel fragmented or absent. By facilitating relationships with inaccessible objects, we are generating a new sense of belonging with all that which those objects represent.
Ancient Fires / Future Waters: Reclaiming Ancient Armenian Rituals
Pouys:
Plant Medicine of Ancient Armenia
DYADS
cover art & layout design by Mahban
DYADS is a collaborative storytelling and art project that gathers SWANA women and queers. It was born out of a desire to reclaim and share silenced and untold narratives from our collective familial ancestries. Within each dyad, one shares an ancestral story they understand as queer and/or feminist, and the other interprets/responds through artwork. Story and artwork will live in a book, side-by-side and in relationship.
The coming together of this collective of artists, storytellers, and participatory researchers centers both a love ethic and methodology of refusal, as the collectivity itself is a refusal to allow the politics of borders and heteropatriarchy of the nation-state to dictate our relationships and bond-building. Illuminating collective ancestral narratives makes space for shared emergence inside fragmented experiences of history, self, and community. It also (re)situates participants inside a lineage long denied of many SWANA queers/feminists.
PROVERBS FROM OUR FOREMOTHERS
This book is a result of collaboration between myself and phenomenal Armenian illustrator @anahitoferebuni. We came together to build on a long line of contemporary and herstorical Armenian feminists, writers, philosophers, journalists, poets, educators, and artists. We put this together because as feminists and Armenians living in the diaspora, we often find ourselves searching (digging) and yearning (desperately) to hear/feel the voices of women in our ancestry and community – not only when our struggles become un- bearable, but also when we want to celebrate ourselves, our powers, our making-of-the-impossible-possible. This book is proof that we are possible, that we have always been possible.
proverbs
proverbs
proverbs
proverbs
KALIK ARTS COMPANY & SPACESHIP
Kalik (գալիք) – As in, Forthcoming. Next. The soon-to-come. Near Future.
We arrive at artmaking as generative and transformative mediums for expressing urgent truths, recalling ancestral stories and teachings, while simultaneously visioning future worlds that centre healing, justice, and love. Through Kalik we will create and produce original and participatory interdisciplinary art, performances, films, digital media, literature, events, gatherings and workshops, working with and alongside many artists, creatives, and advocates for the kinds of worlds and communities we know are possible and that we are actively building.
Kalik comes from the collaborative partnership between Kamee Abrahamian and lee williams boudakian. We are interdisciplinary artists, producers, and facilitators invested in storytelling that integrates our ancestral & cultural herstories, grapples with our current worlds & visions into futures that centre the lives and stories of those of us currently living on the fringe & in the margins.
Hye-Phen Mag
organizing team
The Hye-Phen was founded in 2014 as an online magazine and global collective to connect queer-minded Armenian artists, scholars, writers, and amplify our under-spoken stories, issues, ideas, and visions of the future.
