Ergo Sum, 2021

This is the fourth one.*

This one was different. This time, being inside, I could observe both my surroundings and me from outside. I was released.

When people were calling or writing me, asking how I was, my answer was always the same: “I’m alive”. And, honestly, that was the only description that maximum fit my feelings at that certain time and place.

My blojiks** are about beingness — about the beingness of each of us. They are our inner kids, they are curious, playful, always eager to discover something new, caring and sensitive. They do see and search for. They are the ones who can make us wake up, they are our inner alarms.

                                                                                 15th of April, 2021

The scenes of war do destroy all, elders and youngs, the strong ones and vulnerable, cynical and emotional. And I feel all the dissonance of my emotions and the seriousness of borders when I realize that I was born in a country, where I can sleep in peace and wake up on cold soil of trenches that make my back ache. That country is the Republic of Armenia, where I was born, where theoretical patriotism has no place, where you forbid yourself to dream about peace since you are born because there are dreams which are not destined to come true at all. Artsakh is the cold trench, the sizes and human dimensions of which were observed by me since I was 11. When I was playing under shelling, cleaning my father’s gun under the light of a lamp/candle, and bringing up my two kids, and teaching them to dream.

The scenes of war destroy till the moment when you realize that you are unable to build anything from ruins. “Am I alive?”, I questioned myself and felt that I was released, I was liberated. My own sense of nothingness helped me to answer that question. And I was both cut off and present. Free like the blojiks painted by me post factum in the ruins.

*The fourth war author witnesses.
**Blojiks mean “buggies” in Armenian. The author calls all the creatures he paints “Blojiks”.