Exploring what it means to connect to sonic traditions today, the lab takes on a specific subfocus to examine intersections between sound and diasporic experiences.
The lab will be hosted by Cinna Peyghamy, XXX, and Varoujan Chetirian. Selected fellows will present their artistic practices to the public at NOPA.
Open Call
The open call runs until 8 August 2026, with preference given to artists who reside in or have a diasporic connection to Armenia, Georgia, Iran, Iraq, Syria, the Anatolian region, the Caspian Sea, the Levant, and the Northern Caucasus.
Artistic Fellows
Fellows will be announced in early September.
Theme: Fragmented Distance
With the title Fragmented Distance, this lab edition will focus more specifically on themes of diaspora, memory, displacement, transmission, and hybridity. It will take place in Armenia in collaboration with NOPA, a festival dedicated to sonic arts and experimental music.
In recent years, Armenia has undergone a significant shift – from a place viewed as a mono-ethnic state connected to a large diaspora worldwide, to a country that has become a point of arrival for neighbouring refugees, dissident voices, and diasporic communities. At the same time, the recent ethnic cleansing of Artsakh / Nagorno-Karabakh has forced an entire population to flee, triggering large-scale displacement and the urgent need to rebuild lives from the ground up.
Both internal displacement and migration to new lands entails a continuous renegotiation of identity. It involves leaving behind material memories, social fabrics, routines, practices, audiences, and imagined futures, while encountering new environments in which previous forms of expression may be displaced, silenced, questioned, or transformed. This call is an invitation to artists whose work with resynthesising traditional practices responds to these conditions. How are traditional musical forms maintained, altered, or recontextualised as they move across geographies and societies? How do these transformations manifest across generations? Who judges the authenticity of tradition, and how far can we push before a tradition becomes something unrecognisable?
How can experiences of in-betweenness and non-belonging be articulated through sound? How can we use sound to connect to places that are inaccessible, and what tensions emerge when engaging with a tradition tied to a place one cannot return to? And conversely, when return is possible, how might diasporic sonic practices reshape and re-inscribe the soundscape of their place of origin? Finally, how can sonic expression act as a method of rehumanization, rearticulating stories that were devalued or denied?
Kindly supported by Goethe-Institut Armenia.