Atris festival Peliti Associati Atri Italie
Kathryn Cook puts her trust in trees, the earth and the roads taken by the Armenians to pose questions on their genocide by the Young Turks. Cook does not intend making accusations with her work, but trying rather to understand, to penetrate the mysterious story of the Armenian people, whose ‘disappearance’ began in Istanbul on the night of 23 April 1915. Members of the Armenian elite were arrested then transported to the interior of Anatolia and massacred on the road, along with about a million others so as not to leave any trace. Kathryn Cook went in search of these traces, travelling through Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Turkey and Armenia. She looked for what remained of the Armenian churches, on the roads taken by these people, to the now Kurdish village of Agacli (populated by Armenians 95 years ago), which in Turkish means ‘place with trees’. Trees thus become a metaphor for this extensive research in memory of an entire people, through an inquisitive and subtle eye.
