Heinrich Boell Foundation Yerevan Office-South Caucasus Region in cooperation with Cultural & Social Narratives Laboratory launches a new visual research project Shushi: Mental mapping, on the Memory of IDPs from Shushi (Nagorno-Karabakh) as a result of the Second Karabakh War in Autumn 2020.
During the war days, the evacuated residents of Shushi found temporary shelters in different cities of the Republic of Armenia. As the evacuation was carried out at the time of the hostilities, people were unable collect all their personal belongings. Therefore, they faced the fact that their hometown, daily life in a familiar urban environment, property, etc. would remain only as a collective and personal memory.
The goal of the project is to collect the memories about the city through the oral histories of Armenian population evacuated from Shushi, to map the individually lived city and to compare those memories with corresponding official maps. Thus, the project will reveal the “internal” image of the city, based on personal experience and memory of its residents, which differs significantly from the official description of the city.
As a result, along with research texts and audio fragments of oral histories an extensive illustrative material will be created.