Alongside the programme in the COP17 Official Blue Zone, CSN Lab opened the Blue Yerevan art-doc exhibition in the Public Green Zone, introducing its long-term research on Yerevan’s water heritage to an international, intergenerational audience. From archival photographs and maps to oral histories, artistic interventions, and research on disappearing water infrastructures, the pavilion invites visitors not only to look at the city’s past, but also to move through the different layers of its blue memory.
Debuting in Yerevan at the Museum of Literature and Art and later travelling to Europe, the exhibition now takes on a new form at the COP17 Armenia Green Zone. With each new setting, Blue Yerevan encounters different audiences and opens new possibilities for dialogue around the city’s water memory. At COP17, this journey brings the project into a particularly resonant space, where conversations on biodiversity meet the experiences, questions, and memories of visitors from different generations, geographies, and backgrounds.
Against the visual intensity of the Green Zone, the pavilion constructs its own concentrated space through a restrained language of blue, white, and black. Visitors stop before archival images, recognise places, ask about rivers and lakes that are no longer visible, share fragments of their own memory, and enter into conversation with the CSN Lab team. The exhibition thus becomes more than a presentation of research: it becomes a place where memory is traced collectively.
These encounters are particularly significant for a project concerned with landscapes that continue to change in real time. Blue Yerevan looks at rivers and streams, lakes and reservoirs, fountains, pools, and other water infrastructures whose transformation, degradation, or disappearance has gradually altered both Yerevan’s ecological environment and its everyday social landscape. The archive, in this sense, does not point only backwards. It records an unfinished transformation and creates a vocabulary for recognising what is still disappearing around us.
This is perhaps where an exhibition in an international and intergenerational context space acquires another kind of relevance. At COP17, Blue Yerevan creates room for a shared question: what remains of a city’s relationship with water once its blue spaces begin to vanish from everyday life? Through social and cultural memory, it opens the possibility of another urban imagination. To trace what Yerevan has lost is also to ask what can still be preserved, reclaimed, or imagined differently. The city that emerges through these encounters is therefore neither only the city of the archive nor only the city of the present. It is a city whose blue memory can still become part of its future.
The Blue Yerevan exhibition was implemented by CSN Lab with the support of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, the Danish Cultural Institute, and Goethe-Institut Armenia. It also includes components and materials developed with the support of the Women’s Fund Armenia, Boon TV, the Yerevan History Museum, the National Archives of Armenia, and the HinYerevan Digital Archive.
photo: Daniil Primak