In Translation

One Meme Away from War is anchored in the story of Maro, a child in an orphanage during World War I, whose voice emerges from archival diaries and memoirs, interwoven with contemporary testimonies. The author resists the flattening of war into statistics or distant news cycles. In doing so, Ani Asatryan demonstrates how fragmented testimonies—archival memoirs, diary fragments, oral accounts—can be recomposed into a polyphonic narrative that refuses both silence and spectacle.

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The work was later featured by Drawing the Times, whose editorial framing emphasized geopolitical readings that were not part of the piece itself. This presentation restores the work to its original artistic context — an inquiry into visual storytelling, collective imagination, and the fragile boundary between personal memory and public media.

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Conceived as part of the Creative Europe anthology Last Night on Earth and illustrated by A. Harutyunian, the excerpt shown here belongs to Ani Asatryan’s broader exploration of text, drawing, and mythic reportage. The piece is written in memoriam of the 120,000 Armenians from Artsakh who were forcibly displaced in 2023, extending the work’s meditation on loss, displacement, and endurance.