Lucia Kagramanyan

Blandine Soulage

Venue

Musée des Tissus et des Arts décoratifs

Lyon

Armenian artist
Lives and works in Vienna, Austria

Lullabies are often the first songs heard in life and among the last to be forgotten. Sung to soothe children, they carry language, memory, history and politics from one generation to the next, mainly thanks to the unacknowledged artistry of women. Lucia Kagramanyan's installation centres on Armenian lullabies collected through archival and field research, in the Armenian community in Lyon, across Armenia and diaspora, including songs remembered within her own family. Following the Armenian Genocide in the early twentieth century, these songs became a means of preserving the Western Armenian language and carrying family histories across dispersed communities, though their transmission has been marked by interruption and loss. Four suspended textile hammocks with handmade Armenian needlelace create an intimate space for listening, their form evoking both the womb and the cradle. Textiles taught in post-Genocide orphanages carry echoes of needlework through which Armenian women, in exile, translated memory in thread. Metal panels represent notation and text of lullabies from Western Armenia.

Lucia Kagramanyan’s practice unfolds through sound and installation to explore memory, migration and cultural transmission. Through acts of translation and materialisation, the voice becomes a space in which memory and identity are held and sustained.