FRAGMENTA - Portrait of a country in a state of tension
Armenia 2023 - ongoing
The Republic of Armenia is undergoing historic upheaval. In September 2023, neighboring Azerbaijan decided the decades-old conflict over the Nagorno-Karabakh in its favor by military means. More than 100,000 people were forced to leave the fertile and culturally significant region and escape to Armenia. Russia, once the protecting power with troops in the region, abandoned its ally. Trapped between Turkey in the west and Azerbaijan in the east, with no realistic prospect of Western integration, Armenia now finds itself widely isolated.
My work on FRAGMENTA began in 2023 in Yerevan with a journalistic article on the role of women in the peace process, which was awarded the Eastern Europe Research Prize and published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ). In the last two years, I returned to capture the situation in the country. I encountered a society oscillating between tension, uncertainty, and everyday life. An NGO employee put it this way: “People are negative and nervous. Many have lost faith in politics. We don't know what will happen next.”
This uncertainty is exacerbated by the geopolitical situation. Armenia has the largest freshwater reserves in the Caucasus — a strategic resource in a region where Azerbaijan has oil, gas, and a strong military, but suffers from water scarcity. A conflict over Armenia's water, it now appears, is only a matter of time.
