Summit Meeting
In ‘Summit Meeting’, a mix of archive, collage, photography and video, two women orchestrate a conversation about how time has mutilated their memory and romanticised their past. Camille Lévêque – French, of Armenian descent – and Lucie Khahoutian – an Armenian immigrant to France – discuss and dismantle their relationship with Armenia. The diptych highlights the melancholic nature of the relationship between a community and its heritage and reflects the somewhat chaotic relationship between Armenians and the diaspora. The dialogue deliberately leaves room for inaccuracy and subjective interpretation of collective memories.
Lévêque leads the conversation and uses the family archive to find answers to unresolved issues, while her alias Lucie Khahoutian (her grandmother in real life) responds with more cheerful, kitsch-like images, filled with playful references to her cultural heritage. At first, they appear to be in conflict – as is the case between different generations – but eventually the two find each other in their common desire to get rid of a burden that is more than a hundred years old: the suffering of a community whose genocide (1915) has yet to be recognised by the Turkish government. This internal dialogue, staged and developed as an imaginary conversation between different generations of the same family, illustrates the desire for a new way of talking about Armenian identity.
