Avedis Hadjian
The Armenian pavilion, hosted in a Venetian monastery that has sheltered
the culture for 300 years, won the Golden Lion this year.
“The botanical gardens at Salerno were in a poor state after decades
of dereliction, and when they started renovating them, they found
strange wild plants and exotic flowers blooming,” said Silvina
Der-Meguerditchian, an Armenian-Argentine artist based in Berlin. She
displayed her new installation, Treasures, at this year’s Venice Biennale, with 17 other, mainly diaspora artists (www.armenity.net),
in the Armenian pavilion at the Mekhitarist order’s monastery of St
Lazarus of the Armenians, on a tiny island in the Venetian lagoon. She
had recreated a manuscript, a compilation of folk medicine recipes her
great-grandmother wrote down in a notebook in Buenos Aires more than
70 years ago.
