2023_I Wear My Heart On My Sleeve
        
I wear my heart on my sleeve is composed of four priest's albs, each telling the story of my grandmother and her siblings, who as children fled religious persecution during the Armenian genocide of 1915 and then the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. Far more than mere liturgical vestments, these vestments become narrative artefacts, textile testimonies through which the intimate meets the universal.
The priest's alb is invested with a double symbolic role: on the one hand, it represents the idea of an omnipresent religion, both a refuge and a source of persecution; on the other, it transcends this simple spiritual dimension to become a metaphor for the human condition of migration.
At once a means of identification, a second skin, a mask or a protective weave, it symbolises an intergenerational cultural and spiritual heritage that is worn, transmitted and reinvented over time. Like a suit of armour, it protects and at the same time bears the scars of trauma, making it both a solid and vulnerable shell.

In this dialectic between fragility and strength, the illustrations on the dresses, created in a naive, dreamlike style (inspired by medieval Armenian religious imagery, an art rich in symbols and narrative motifs), play a crucial role. These illustrations place family stories in the context of childhood imagination and evoke the epic tales handed down between generations; stories both rooted in tragic reality and fantasized by the imagination.

Trivial details rub shoulders with the defining moments of these four different journeys, building narratives out of memories that are often relegated to the background of the greater history. White, the predominant color of the alb, evokes the purity and innocence of childhood shattered by exile, while symbolizing the blank canvas, a space conducive to narrative, where memories, stories and fragments of collective memory take shape.
Worn by others, the dress loses its status as an immobile, static object and becomes a living, evolving armour, passed down through generations. It evokes the transformation of a historical burden into a legacy, a tool of resilience and cultural reappropriation.