Living Literature
RAW READING SESSIONS AT TUMO WITH SCHOLARS FROM UNIBAS, SWITZERLAND
In June 2025, Ani Asatryan convened scholars, academics, and students for a three-hour Raw Reading Session, engaging with the mechanics of narrative, memory, and literary perception. Participants read closely exclusive prepublication excerpts from her upcoming works, including selections from her transnational comic project, interrogating questions of language, trauma, and collective memory. The session was documented in collaboration with acclaimed photographer Inna Mkhitarian, who captured over a dozen raw, unembellished images. Executed in a documentary tradition resisting the glamourization or aestheticization of literary events, the photographs trace the shifting dynamics between author and reader across discussion, framed within the architectural presence of TUMO’s iconic lecture hall, foregrounding literature as lived, performative, and dialogic, and situating Armenian literary experience within global questions of transformation—and vice versa.
Launched in July 2024 at Villa Empain, Brussels, the Raw Reading Sessions began as literary interventions and cross-disciplinary dialogues featuring prepublication excerpts from Asatryan’s novel. In 2025, the program expanded across Europe and North America and is now extending to the United Kingdom, promoting curated exchanges across literary, visual, and performative registers, with forthcoming sessions in Delikipos (Sep 2025), Frankfurt (Oct 2025), and Brighton (Jan 2026). Through these ongoing sessions, Asatryan’s work is reframed as a living archive, where text, reading, and discourse converge in real time—an experimental site for research, pedagogy, and aesthetic exploration.
Fragments - Young Scholar
Auditorium
2025, Inna Mkhitaryan
Fragments - Introduction
Lectorium
2025, Inna Mkhitaryan
Each session is a space where text, memory, and dialogue intersect: readers engage directly with prepublication excerpts, tracing the architecture of narrative and the contours of collective experience. The work is attentive to the shifting roles of author and reader, the performativity of reading, and the delicate negotiation of presence and absence.
Documented through a lens that resists glamourization, the sessions reveal literature in its raw, dynamic state—situated within architectural, cultural, and pedagogical contexts. By foregrounding Armenian literary experience within broader global currents, the sessions become portals: sites where memory, language, and creative thought converge, and where discourse itself transforms into a living archive.
Excerpt, One Meme Away from War
© All right rese
Each Raw Reading Session opens with a letter addressed to Dear Stranger, timestamped 03:06, Dec 25, and signed by Nobody_070—the novel’s central figure. At sixteen, a relocant from Artsakh now isolated in her Yerevan studio, Nobody_070 refuses to narrate her own story, leaving the reader suspended between presence and absence. ‘What is the point of telling stories? Isn’t it the 21st century?’ she asks when pressed about her experiences of war.
The novel’s pages, however, are dense with echoes from the past: fragments drawn from the diaries and memoirs of Maro Alazan, a child orphaned during and after WWI, later exiled as a bearer of inconvenient truths. Maro’s archival voice does not overwrite Nobody_070’s silence; it channels and amplifies it, creating a dialogue across a century. In this interplay of refusal and testimony, the novel stages a meditation on memory, intergenerational trauma, and the ethical limits of storytelling.
The Raw Reading Sessions thus double as a site of first encounter with One Meme Away. Emerging from Armenia yet conceived as a transnational dialogue, the comic reframes the meme—ephemeral, ironic, endlessly shareable—into a vessel of historical weight. The novel functions less as a closed narrative than as a living archive—where humor, irony, and détournement intersect with unresolved histories. It examines how digital culture absorbs and distorts experiences of war and displacement. Through fractured panels, shifting registers, and deliberate interruptions, the work resists the seamless flow of story, staging instead collisions between the intimate and the collective, the personal and the viral.
Moving between testimony, archival traces, and internet vernacular, One Meme Away exposes how catastrophe is metabolized in the digital age—where history remains just one click, one swipe, one meme away.
Excerpt, One Meme Away from War
© All right rese
Excerpt, One Meme Away from War
© All right rese
Art is the Key
2025, Inna Mkhitaryan
Together, these sessions form a living archive—where author and readers negotiate literature in real time, and where works in progress circulate before they become books.
HeArt is the Key
2025, Inna Mkhitaryan
With forthcoming sessions in Delikipos (Sep 2025), Frankfurt (Oct 2025), and Brighton (Jan 2026), Raw Reading Sessions continue to expand across borders, foregrounding literature as a practice of encounter, disruption, and transformation.