On September 19, nineteen days after the last recording in this series was made, Azerbaijan launched a full-armed attack on Artsakh, followed by the ethnic cleansing of Armenians from Artsakh.

The series includes personal accounts, rarely reflected in the professional mass media field. During the recording process, I tried not to interrupt my narrators with questions as much as possible, leaving them to talk freely about their experiences and difficulties after the war.

Realizing the sharp change in political and social reality in Artsakh and Armenia after the ethnic cleansing, I still decided to publish the conversations as they are, reflecting the difficulties, sentiments, and hopes of the narrators at that time, before the ethnic cleansing occurred, as a small archive of personal experience of historical realities. Most stories are published anonymously.

https://annagrigorian.art/offstage/

The project is in progress, new recordings will be added periodically.

Special thank you to Susanna Gyulamiryan and the “Art Commune” International Artist-in-Residence Program (ACSL – Armenia), as well as to Raffi Movsisyan, Mayis Margaryan, Arsen Abrahamyan, Shushanna, Meline, Vigen, Vardan, Arevik, Nane, Ruzanna, who helped to find people interested in participating in the project.

Huge thank you to Armen Ohanyan for the Armenian speech-to-text transcription.

Translations: at this moment, translations don’t reflect the variety of accents and dialects of the narrators. The translation is to make the content more accessible to a wider audience. Where possible, I’ve added short notes in square brackets to make the context clearer.

Use of information: The text and audio materials included in this project cannot be used by a third party without the artists’ explicit authorization. The use of the presented text and audio in its entirety or partially by a third party with the intent to cause any harm to the participants, manipulate the story they tell, or distort the discourse is prohibited.