GLENDALE ARTS AND CULTURE COMMISSION: Armenian Genocide Remembrance Month

As part of Armenian Genocide Remembrance Month, the Arts and Culture Commission presents “My Relic” by She Loves Collective which is an interactive art installation that intends to activate our community to transform their relics of genocide broadly construed into creative objects and outlets for the collective mourning of trauma through transformation. This installation will take place within the City’s three retail units on Artsakh Ave. (117 Artsakh Ave., 123 Artsakh Ave., and 127 Artsakh Ave.) from April 11-25 and will feature three individual installations:

“A Ritual in Bread Making” (117. Artsakh Ave.) will invite Armenian bakers and chefs to use Lavash bread traditional Armenian oven baked bread, to create items that make up a typical room in a home- featuring everyday home furnishings. Lavash activates a cultural and biological reality in many Armenians, as food is one of the most important human memories. Abstract bread is often a symbol for hunger, starvation- or hunger for change. Additionally, a short film/documentary will be either projected in large format wall-to wall/ceiling-to-floor or played on a variety of television screens vintage, varying sized televisions. The short film will be of a healing ritual performed by collective members, as well as footage from two previous performance art documentaries.
“Relics” (123 Artsakh Ave.) will feature 50-yard-long white tapestries suspended from the ceiling of a store that displays digitally printed images of Armenian relics-ancestral heirlooms, objects that evoke a memory of ancestral struggles, scars, and loss, but also, of triumph and survival or images/photos of a time before. A QR code will allow spectators to scan and learn more about each relic.
“Reclamation” (127 Artsakh Ave.) features hundreds of shoes which will be placed in piles the remnants of a war/bombing with a backdrop of Mount Ararat (a large scale digital black and white poster).