The Eclipse

I was invited to conceive a creative response to the Dildilian archives — an archive so comprehensively articulated by Armen Marsobian in his book Fragments of a Lost Homeland: Remembering Armenia — for the exhibition Continuity and Rupture: An Armenian Family Odyssey at the Brand Library and Art Center in Glendale California..

While reading Marsobian’s book, it was impossible not to notice the uncanny parallels: The Hamidian Massacres that both of our grandparent endured, the voyage to America at the turn of the 19th century, Aram’s wife Christine, whose surname, Der Kasparian, is the surname of my grandfather.

In The Eclipse, I invite the viewer to participate in my imaginary space — an invented passing of two ships between two families and two worlds during a solar eclipse.

Crossing 1 quotes directly from Aram’s diaries as he tells the reader about his first failed attempt to be a passenger on a liner ship leaving the port city of Piraeus, Greece and heading to America. Simultaneously, Crossing 2 finds my grandmother, Margaret, as a young girl on a similar ship leaving the port city of Le Havre, France, her text conceived and fabricated by me.

In the end, Aram and Margaret are two Armenians whose paths may have never crossed or perhaps in fact they did, when left to my imagination.

The Eclipse becomes a continuation of the fictional diaries, The Daybooks of Margaret Jurigian, from the Once Removed project.