The eerie, beguiling landscape of Armenia serves as the backdrop in The Transgression of Light, an experimental video I made in 2017 that fuses original poetry, music, ancient Armenian text, and sound manipulation to explore questions of time, space, and the ungraspable essence inside each of us and out in the cosmos—the harmony and dissonance that connects everyone and everything. The landscapes shown cover the rugged, stunning, and often barren stretch going south, from Areni to Goris and beyond, to Artsakh. A road I was lucky enough to take many times. Also Included are the ancient Carahunge site (“Armenian Stonehenge”) and Spandaryan Reservoir.

Today the footage we innocently shot back then has taken on an added surreal air of tragedy. Starting in September 2020, Artsakh and Armenia have been illegally and brutally attacked by Azerbaijan. Some of the landscape in the film is extremely close to where people lost their lives, homes, and hundreds of years of rootedness. Some of the those who lost their lives defending their country were my students.

As a tiny gesture, I dedicate this film to them.

The idea for the film came about in 2017 when I was invited by HAYP Gallery to write poems at a residency at the Buyrakan Observatory (one of the premiere observatories in the USSR). But as I explored the half-abandoned historic grounds and met with the small but dedicated group of physicists, it seemed like text wouldn't be enough to capture the strangeness and melancholy beauty of the place. That's when I remembered the casual footage Roubina Margossian and I had shot on my iPhone on one of our drives to Artsakh. So the poem I'd been writing became a videopoem and installation. It was exhibited in the abandoned auditorium where Carl Sagan and other renowned scientists held a conference in 1971 about the possibilities of alien life.