ONE MEME AWAY FROM WAR
A Graphic Narrative by Ani Asatryan
Presented at Frankfurter Buchmesse 2025 · International Stage
Part of the EU Creative Europe anthology Last Night on Earth
Concept Author — Ani Asatryan
Story & Script — Ani Asatryan
Editor — Mikheil Tsikhelashvili
Panel Division — Mikheil Tsikhelashvili
Illustration — A. Harutyunyan
Mentor — Reinhard Kleist
Publishers — ARI Literature Foundation · Komora Books · LIG
Supported by — EU Creative Europe Programme (2023–25)
Presented at Frankfurter Buchmesse 2025 · International Stage
as part of the EU Creative Europe anthology Last Night on Earth
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.
First shown internationally at 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 · 2025
TRAJECTORY 2025
FRANKFURT BOOK FAIR 2025 · INTERNATIONAL STAGE
Presented 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 trilingual voice joining the transnational conversation on memory, image, and tenderness after catastrophe.
Frankfurter Buchmesse 2025 · International Stage — EU Creative Europe presentation
UCY · OPENING CONVERSATION 2025
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
Official UCY Forum listing
Nicossia · Post-forum discussion · by Phill Adams
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.
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UNIBAS · GUEST AUTHOR SEMINAR 2025
Included in the MA programme Eastern European Arts and Activism, 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..
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.
UNIBAS · MA Seminar on Eastern European Arts · Raw Reading Sessions
by Inna Mkrtchian
Read more about the meeting and the Raw Reading Sessions here
YEREVAN BOOKFEST 2025 · 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, included in the Creative Europe anthology Last Night on Earth
© 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.
INTERNATIONAL COMIC-SALON ERLANGEN 2024
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 2024
A verified reference can be accessed through Komora Books
VILLA EMPAIN · BOGHOSSIAN FOUNDATION · BRUSSELS 2024
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
Read more about the residency here
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, included in the Creative Europe anthology Last Night on Earth
© 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.
