Sun/Sun Editions is a young multidisciplinary creative outfit run by two people, Céline Pévrier and Laurent Onde. Sun/Sun publishes books, designs objects and organises events and has just published its first photography book entitled “Hayastan” by Nanda Gonzague. Hayastan simply means Armenia, the small Caucasian country caught between Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Iran. Between 2007 and 2010, Gonzague travelled to Armenia several times to pull back the veil on this country about which we actually know little, other than the tragic events of the 1915 genocide when Armenians in Turkey were decimated, or the 1988 earthquake and its 300,000 fatalities. We feel heavy-hearted when we hear the country’s name, but here the photographer delivers images of an independent country that is undergoing renaissance and rising up from the ruins of communism.
“In Armenia, yesterday and tomorrow are fighting it out, right in front of us.”
Are there any unexplored regions left at all? Where actually is the end of the earth? Armenia is one of those places which retains an air of mystery, a country we have trouble placing on the map and whose history we know little about. Like a melancholy poem, the country seems eternally attached to its ancestral image – one that is magnificent though sometimes chaotic. However, today, Armenia is writing a new page in its long history. It has been independent for the last twenty-five years, after fifteen centuries of domination and three thousand years of existence. Armenian society is re-emerging from the ruins of communism and embarking on some new forward-looking projects, trying to cut out a new path through the labyrinth of time. In Armenia, yesterday and tomorrow are fighting it out, right in front of us.
As he travelled the four corners of the Armenian provinces and the self-governing region of Nagorno Karabakh, Nanda Gonzague simply followed the Armenians themselves listening to their stories and looking at what they wanted to show, exploring and documenting the country as it undergoes profound change. A discovery of an astonishing territory at the heart of our modern society.
BOOK
Hayastan
Photographs by Nanda Gonzague
Texts by Serge Avédikian and Gérard Dédéyan
French/English
Format : 21 x 24 cm, 120 pages
800 copies
39€
http://sunsun.fr
