© Georges De Kinder
© Fondation Boghossian, Josef and Anni Albers exhibition, Villa Empain, Brussels, 2024
Villa Empain: Architecture as Interlocutor
Built between 1930 and 1934 by the Swiss architect Michel Polak, Villa Empain is an Art Deco landmark whose history traces exile, abandonment, and restoration. Today, under the Boghossian Foundation, it stands as a crossroads between East and West — a site where architecture becomes a stage for hospitality, encounter, and cultural dialogue.
The Raw Reading Sessions first emerged here, in resonance with the Villa’s layered identity: its modernist geometry, its curatorial discourse on thresholds, and its ongoing role as a space where disciplines converge. To situate writing within this architecture was not a choice of convenience but a necessary alignment. The Villa was not backdrop, but collaborator.
During her July 2024 residency, Asatryan’s practice intersected with Josef and Anni Albers: Iconic Couple of Modernism, a landmark exhibition at Villa Empain curated by Nicholas Fox Weber, Julia Garimorth, Edouard Detaille, with Jean-Marie Wynants in dialogue.
The Alberses — pioneers of Bauhaus pedagogy and modernist experimentation — placed line, texture, and color into dynamic conversation across media. In this charged setting, Asatryan’s poetry drafts and inaugural Raw Reading Sessions reframed literature as a parallel practice of spatial and material encounter, extending the Villa’s curatorial investigations of modernism, exile, and cross-disciplinary exchange into the field of language.
Installation view, Josef and Anni Albers, Iconic couple of modernism, Boghossian Foundation – Villa Empain, Brussels, 2024. Photo by Silvia Cappellari
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© Nicolas Lobet
Villa Empain, Summer Party, poolside DJ set; Classical music session, atrium; Conference program. Courtesy of Fondation Boghossian.
Villa Empain’s cultural program extends its architecture into rhythm and encounter. Weekly summer parties unfold by the pool with DJ sets and live music; classical concerts reverberate through the marble atrium; and public talks gather international curators, writers, and philosophers. In this way, the Villa becomes not only a site of exhibition but a living stage — where art, music, theory, and performance intersect within one architectural body. It was within this continuum that poetry entered the program. As part of the residency, Asatryan’s readings were presented in conversation with the Villa’s curatorial discourse, situating literary language alongside sound and movement. The poems were not recited as isolated texts but performed as part of the Villa’s larger ecology of voice, rhythm, and collective attention.
Excerpts from The Return to Birth
© Ani A. Asatryan, 2024
Cocoon
After a long pause—
A meeting.
In familiar features—
Glimmering eyes,
An overflow of heartfelt laughter,
Calm,
Familiar
Lightness.
Inhale – exhale.
A wrinkle on the forehead,
A tremor in the fingers,
A torn cocoon—
Right on time—
After a long pause—
In aliveness—
Face to face—
Again—
Myself, to myself.
The following poems were composed and first performed during the Villa Empain residency in July 2024. They belong to Projects in Situ, a body of work where writing emerges in dialogue with place, program, and architecture.
Villa Empain, 2024
Work, solitude, reflection.
Image: Ani A. Asatryan. Courtesy of the artist.
Leap
After a long pause—
A meeting.
In the garden—
On a brown bench—
By the lake—
With myself.
A dog wrapped in gray fur
Racing toward me.
A stop—
Right before my feet.
A sniff at my white shoes,
A ritual of acquaintance.
And a leap—
Upward.
A meeting—
Within the bench.
The dog and I—wrapped in gray fur—
In the process of becoming humanlike.
After a long pause—
A meeting—
Within the bench.
At Villa Empain, literature unfolded not in solitude but within the building’s active life of exhibitions, concerts, and public gatherings. Presented here as exclusive excerpts prior to publication, each text carries the imprint of the Villa — its light, its rhythm, its modernist geometry — and appears alongside images that document the process of writing and reading in situ.
Villa Empain, 2024
Work, solitude, reflection.
Image: Ani A. Asatryan. Courtesy of the artist.
Free Fall
After a long pause—
A meeting.
In the flow of life.
Half-incomplete,
Half-whole,
Half-flawed,
Half-precise.
One—imperfect,
Another one—perfect.
In the process of free fall.
An exit—
Downward—
To the threshold of living.
After a long pause—
A meeting—
Face to face.
Again—
Myself, to myself.
Villa Empain, 2024
Work, solitude, reflection.
Image: Ani A. Asatryan. Courtesy of the artist.
These experiments in presence and text became the groundwork for what would later evolve into the Raw Reading Sessions, where literature circulates live as encounter and negotiation before reaching the form of a book.
Villa Empain, 2024
Work, solitude, reflection.
Image: Ani A. Asatryan. Courtesy of the artist.
Villa Empain, 2024
From left: Ani A. Asatryan, Zahra Safaverdi (United States–Iran), Tarek Haddad (Lebanon), Laetitia el Hakim (Lebanon).
Courtesy of the artists.