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This text is a part of Hyperallergic’s Satisfaction Month collection, that includes an interview with a special transgender or nonbinary rising or mid-career artist each weekday all through the month of June.
Primarily based in Detroit, Michigan, nonbinary Armenian-American artist Levon Kafafian is a weaver of phrases, threads, and worlds. Kafafian investigates pre-Christian and Ottoman Armenian cultures and livelihoods, inspecting archaeological objects and materials archives to tell a world that exists within the “Armenian diasporic imaginary.” Kafafian specified that they don’t seem to be transcribing this constructed realm, however fairly channeling it by their multidisciplinary observe of thread and clothes, language and textual content, and spiritually imbued objects. Amid Azerbaijan’s ongoing destruction of historic and culturally important websites, Kafafian breathes a brand new, queer life into misplaced customs and traditions, giving them an area to develop with the diaspora.
Within the interview under, the artist expresses their want for a “queer Armenian future,” acknowledging the staunch colonialist and imperialist binary that enforces conventional gender roles. Kafafian’s present exhibition on the Stamps Gallery on the College of Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus consists of elegantly constructed clothes and equipment, highly effective amulets, and bodily renditions of the in-between portal that connects the artist to this futuristic scape derived from the previous. “Material is vers,” Kafafian says. “Material communicates. Weaving makes use of a binary system to supply non-binary objects which can be higher than the sum of their elements.”
Hyperallergic: What’s the present focus of your creative observe?
Levon Kafafian: Thread by thread, I’m presently constructing a narrative world referred to as Azadistan for an eventual graphic novel titled Portal Hearth. This world emerges from the diasporic imaginary of Southwest Asia and is ready in a distant future after a digital collapse. As of now, I’m specializing in its cosmology — the spirit beings who shield the individuals of the land and permit them to observe fireplace magic. To that finish I dive into analysis on Armenian religious traditions, practices, and objects by time, mixing this with my lived experiences and needs for the long run. As I synthesize these into woven materials, costumes, and artifacts, I be taught in regards to the character of this world and the beings who inhabit it, producing the written lore and narrative that inform future works.
H: In what methods — if any — does your gender identification play a task in your expertise as an artist?
LK: My journey with gender is a mirrored image of the numerous areas of in-betweenness I’ve grown up in and are available to phrases with — main me to interact my work with an attentiveness to hybridity, blurred boundaries, and in the end new prospects outdoors of “established canon.” I mix disciplines and interweave my practices: Handcrafting costumes and artifacts helps me intuitively synthesize archival analysis, familial histories, and private expertise, which in flip helps me generate poetry, quick tales, and efficiency work usually centered round play within the expression of gender.
H: Which artists encourage your work at the moment? What are your different sources of inspiration?
LK: I’m all the time a bit disarmed by the query of which artists encourage me as I’m influenced by an infinite parade of inventive practitioners. Notably, although, I’m impressed by my ancestors, each blood-related and past; all my collaborators: Nick Szydlo, Ash Arder, Kamelya Omayma Youssef, Kamee Abrahamian, Augusta Morrison, Lara Sarkissian, amongst others; and by the copious quantities of sci-fi and fantasy media (graphic and animated, live-action, video video games, board video games, novels) I interact with; and lastly, the character, science, language, or historical past documentaries and YouTube shorts I watch earlier than mattress.
H: What are your hopes for the LGBTQIA+ neighborhood on the present second?
LK: At this second, my hope is that in all of the locations we’re suppressed and beneath assault, we proceed to boldly declare area, displaying these round us that alternative ways of being are doable, lovely, and intrinsically worthwhile; that we can not and won’t be erased or silenced; and that we proceed to expertise considerable pleasure, relaxation, and love amidst this battle.
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