LAST NIGHT ON EARTH
Anthology
Premiered at the
ONE MEME AWAY FROM WAR
Graphic Narrative by Ani Asatryan
Concept & Narrative : Ani Asatryan
Story & Script: Ani Asatryan
Editor: Mikheil Tsikhelashvili
Panel: Mikheil Tsikhelashvili
Illustration: A. Harutyunyan
Mentor: Reinhard Kleist
90 pages
Quadrilingual edition (ARM, UKR, GO, ENG)
Published by ARI Literature Foundation · Komora Books · LIG
Supported by EU Creative Europe Programme (2023–25)
Yerevan, Armenia
Kyiv, Ukraine
Tbilisi, Georgia
2025
On One Meme Away From War
One Meme Away From War is not a regional war story. It is an inquiry into how witness endures in an image-saturated century.
Premiered at the Frankfurter Buchmesse 2025, the work gathers memes, phone screenshots, and fragments of diaries as unstable evidence—shareable, corrupted, yet inescapably human. It refuses both propaganda and sentimentality, turning the digital image into a site of mourning and resistance.
Formally, the piece moves between confession, archival record, and constructed visual memory. It stages a collision between the intimate voice (“Dear stranger …”) and the public feed, between private pain and the algorithmic gaze. Its language speaks from the edge of empire but addresses the center of visual culture—the question of who gets to narrate catastrophe, and at what cost.
This work extends the documentary-literary tradition into the visual field, where the ethics of witnessing must continually reinvent themselves under the glare of the screen. It is a hybrid form that makes the act of witnessing itself the subject.
- Ani Asatryan
TRAJECTORY 2025
FRANKFURT Buchmesse
International Stage
Premiered at the Frankfurter Buchmesse 2025
within the EU Creative Europe anthology Last Night on Earth — the English edition of One Meme Away From War marked its first international showing, a quadrilingual voice joining the broader conversation on memory, image, and tenderness after catastrophe.
Frankfurter Buchmesse 2025 · International Stage
UCY - OPENING CONVERSATION
One Meme Away from War: Catastrophe in the Age of Likes and Spectacle. Moderated by Prof. James Little (Bloomsbury). The dialogue opened the academic year 2025–26, reframing the graphic narrative as an encounter between witness and screen.
Poster · Department of English Studies, UCY
Excerpt from One Meme Away from War, Last Night on Earth, 2025
© Reproduced with permission of the publishers.
Concept: Ani Asatryan
Story & Script: Ani Asatryan
Editor: Mikheil Tsikhelashvili
Panel Division: Mikheil Tsikhelashvili
Illustration: A. Harutyunyan
Mentor: Reinhard Kleist
Published by ARI Literature Foundation · Komora Books · LIG
Supported by EU Creative Europe Programme (2023–25)
Excerpt from One Meme Away from War, Last Night on Earth, 2025
Post-forum discussion on AI, authorship, and the ethics of writing catastrophe — continuing the conversation through questions of responsibility, representation, and the pace at which empathy erodes in the digital age.
Nicossia · Post-forum discussion · by Phill Adams
UNIBAS · GUEST AUTHOR · SEMINAR
Included in the MA programme Eastern European Arts, co-taught by Dr Anna Hodel (Slavic Literatures, Eastern European History & Anthropology) and Lilit Khandakaryan (PhD Candidate, European Culture & Literature). Students engaged with Asatryan’s translated texts, whose voice outlines new cartographies of Eastern Europe and the diaspora.
MA Seminar · UNIBAS · Switzerland · 2025
During the session, pre-publication excerpts from One Meme Away from War were read aloud for the first time — not only read, but heard.
“It feels as if you wrote a mirror for those who ask writers to speak of catastrophe on command. As if you say, I will not tell stories by request; instead, I will write a mirror and hand it back — look at it.”
A student’s reflection that evening — precise, luminous — became both critique and glimpse of hope.
Meeting with UNIBAS students
YEREVAN BOOKFEST · English Edition Launch
English-edition launch preceding Frankfurt — introducing Armenian readers to a work born of collective pain and conceived to intervene in the wider discourse on the illusory cult of safety and the terrors of the attention economy.
Yerevan BookFest 2025 · English Edition Launch
Excerpt from One Meme Away from War, Last Night on Earth, 2025
© Reproduced with permission of the publishers.
Concept: Ani Asatryan
Story & Script: Ani Asatryan
Editor: Mikheil Tsikhelashvili
Panel Division: Mikheil Tsikhelashvili
Illustration: A. Harutyunyan
Mentor: Reinhard Kleist
Published by ARI Literature Foundation · Komora Books · LIG
Supported by EU Creative Europe Programme (2023–25)
INTERNATIONAL COMIC-SALON ERLANGEN · Stuttgart
Residency and work-in-progress presentation, panels and conversations on war narratives and the languages of witness. Workshops with programme mentor Reinhard Kleist were held across the Salon venues, focusing on narrative compression, ethics of depiction, and the responsibility of the drawn image in representing trauma.
International Comic Salon - Comic-Salon Erlangen
VILLA EMPAIN · BRUSSELS
BOGHOSSIAN FOUNDATION
Writer-in-Residence. Here the work began — among mirrors, silence, and archival light. The residency shaped its earliest vocabulary of fracture and reflection, setting in motion the tension between testimony that refuses representation and the image that insists on appearing.
Villa Empain Residency · Boghossian Foundation, Brussels
FROM PAGE TO PUBLICATION
A closing spread from One Meme Away from War — the letter that opens the book and closes the circle. Presented here in its original handwritten form and a type-set version for readability.
Excerpt from One Meme Away from War, Last Night on Earth, 2025
© Ani Asatryan 2025
© ARI Literature Foundation
Illustration © A. Harutyunian;
Editor-in-chief Mikheil Tsikhelashvili; Excerpt from One Meme Away from War,
included in the Creative Europe anthology Last Night on Earth
— an EU-funded programme
published by ARI Literature Foundation.
Reproduced with permission of the publishers.
© Reproduced with permission of the publishers.
Concept: Ani Asatryan
Story & Script: Ani Asatryan
Editor: Mikheil Tsikhelashvili
Panel Division: Mikheil Tsikhelashvili
Illustration: A. Harutyunyan
Mentor: Reinhard Kleist
Published by ARI Literature Foundation · Komora Books · LIG
Supported by EU Creative Europe Programme (2023–25)