Lilit Matevosyan’s project An Island Surrounded by Land explores the folklore of the indigenous peoples of the Northwest Caucasus and its role in the history and culture of the present.
Lilit aims to trace and artistically interpret the interconnections between mythological figures, literary images, and historical events in this area.
The origin of this research is the project Resortworld, which the artist began in March 2021 and which looks at representations of Sochi from the 1950s through the 1990s. Using images of the city on tourist postcards, amateur photographs, and reportage, Matevosyan examines how the image of the resort as a «heavenly» place is formed and how it differs from the local social, cultural, and historical landscapes. An Island Surrounded by Land continues and expands the artist’s research and looks at «pre-resort» characters and stories from this place.
The initial research materials will be diaries and literature containing material on the geography, ethnography, and history of Cherkessia and Abkhazia. These include the travelogue Russian Colonization: Two Caucasian Roads by Jean Carroll (1899; Russian translation 2022); the diary of spy James Bell, Journal of a Residence in Circassia 1837, 1838, 1839 (1840); the notes of the traveler and archeologist Frédéric Dubois, Journey Around the Caucasus (1937); spy Fedor Tornau’s book Memoirs of an Officer in the Caucasus (1864); agricultural research by the historian Samir Khotko, Old Circassian Gardens (2005); and Bagrat Shinkuba’s novel The Last of the Departed (1976), about the deportation of the Ubykhs, an Adygo-Abkhazian ethnic sub-group who lived in the Sochi river valley. The artist will also travel to auls (fortified villages) in the Lazarevsky and Tuapsinsky districts and settlements in the Republic of Abkhazia and will film in the republics of Adygea, Kabardino-Balkaria, and Karachaevo-Cherkessia. One of the experts involved in the project will be Vitaly Shtybin, author of the book Dances, Mountains, and Chestnut Honey (2020) about the history, culture, and worldview of the Adyghe (Cherkess) people.
