A film by Sarine Vosgueritchian
Produced by Huma Gupta
Executive Producers:
Mahwish Khalil
Meitha Al Mazrooei
Supported by The Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT
A Climate Futures, Cities Past Production
Looking for Pirdoudan begins in the year 2086. Decille, a seeker representing the land where the mountain Pirdoudan was located in the southern Syunik region of Armenia, searches through regional archives to understand how the mountain was lost. Through a deep dive into the archives, Decille takes us on a journey through time. After geological excavations in the 19th century, the name Kajarants, the village of the brave people, which faced Mount Pirdoudan was borrowed to build the adjacent mining city of Kajaran during
the industrial movement which was accelerated under the Soviets. The mining city and the Zangezur Copper-Molybdenum Combine were built to excavate the land and extract copper and molybdenum to be exported to the rest of the USSR, seeping large quantities of toxins into the ground. As the license to mine in Kajaran was set to expire in 2041, a new north-
south corridor was built to connect Georgia, Armenia, and Iran. This was seen as a prime opportunity to rebrand Kajaran as an ecological town championing industries like carbon sequestration. But carbon sequestration was taken too far, and large pockets of carbon underground began to cause earthquakes. Despite the dangerous earthquakes, the Kajarants people would not leave their homes, or their land, which they had protected for
centuries. Thus, they found a way t o stay by floating their homes above the land, towards the sky, but remaining tethered to their ancestral lands.
Read more about the film making workshop: https://jaeonline.org/issue-article/may-our-egos-die-so-that-the-world-may-live/
source
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