Gegisian: When I arrived in New York, there was already a shift in my practice toward working with found and archival material. Goukassian: How did Handbook of the Spontaneous Other come about? Where did you look for images to use in your collages? One of these locations was New York in 2014, where I started work on Handbook of the Spontaneous Other. I studied in Glasgow and Brighton, and the UK has been my base in my adult life, but I have also lived temporarily in other places for fellowships, long-term residencies, and fieldwork. I was born in Thessaloniki, spent my childhood on the border with Turkey, and returned to Thessaloniki for high school. My family is constructed through this dispersal of people. My Armenian grandfather came from Izmir, so he was already a diasporic part of the Armenian community. My mother’s family, both my grandmother and grandfather, were Pontic Greeks who came as children to Thessaloniki from the Black Sea coast. All of my grandparents came from different parts of what was the Ottoman Empire. How did your own family history inspire these explorations?Īikaterini Gegisian: I am a diasporic subject, and also a mixed one.

Aikaterini Gegisian, from Handbook of the Spontaneous Other, 2020Įlena Goukassian: A lot of your work fills in the gaps between various traditional or accepted identities-national, ethnic, and otherwise.

Ottoman empire alternate history