Emptiness and Placemaking in Small Armenian Towns

When Maria Gunko began her ethnographic fieldwork in a small Armenian town in late 2022, people in casual conversation would tell her that “there is nothing here” (stegh vochinch chka [ստեղ ոչինչ չկա]). This “nothingness” is similar to other local descriptors - emptiness, abandonment, ruination, lostness, etc. - found throughout the post-Soviet region and beyond. They pertain to life in places losing people, jobs, infrastructures, and welfare. Yet the “nothing here” does not mean an actual absence of things. It encompasses the condition of reordering, the changing relations between people, space, state, and capital after the collapse of state socialism. “Nothing” is actually “something,” produced by the combination of “shock therapy,” liberalisation, hectic privatisation, and the tensions of reterritorialisation.
In this presentation, Maria led us through her reading of a place that was described by its residents as being “created out of void” by the Soviet state and “collapsing back into void” after the dissolution of the USSR.
This event was held in collaboration with the Emptiness research project, hosted by the Centre on Migration, Policy & Society (COMPAS) in the School of Anthropology & Museum Ethnography (SAME) at the University of Oxford, UK, and the European Research Council.