About

In the midst of mounting pressure to join an anti-regime uprising, Badaskhan discovers coded messages from their ancestors through a mysterious plant growing in their safe house.

ITERATIONS

Ensouled is an interdisciplinary, iterative storytelling project that blends magical realism, visionary fiction, and ancestral reclamation. It takes shape through an illustrated book (in collaboration with artist Lorik Khodaverdian), an immersive installation, a multi-phase film project, and a digital media platform.

SYNOPSIS

In a near future where state-sanctioned violence has nearly wiped out an entire generation of resistors, elders, and keepers-of-ancestral knowledge, Ensouled follows a solitary botanist and coder (Badaskhan) who translates frequencies from the plant-life growing in their greenhouse and lab. As pressure mounts to join an ongoing underground resistance movement, Badaskhan buries further into their work as they become obsessed with recording and decoding unusual frequencies from a newly sprouted plant. The frequencies slowly reveal themselves to be secret correspondences between Badaskhan’s ancestors, a group of resistors and practitioners of magic who survived on their own terms in Ottoman Turkey at the turn of the 20th century. Badaskhan, who has a complicated relationship with their family history and Armenian ancestry, is now forced to contend with a resurfacing of painful childhood memories. Weaved throughout this intergenerational narrative are glimpses of an ethereal, simulated dimension in which a mysterious narrator (Araxi) discovers their own existence whilst transcribing chronicles of the lives of Badaskhan’s ancestors.

INCITING REALITIES & STORYWORLD

Ensouled is an intergenerational narrative that weaves magical realism and speculative fiction with histories of resistance movements and SWANA (Southwest Asia, North Africa) culture. The idea evolved out of a collaboration through Kalik Arts with lee williams boudakian called World of Q, featuring distinct iterations that revolve around a central storyworld. Hackers, healers, and cultural workers have formed an underground movement to resist totalitarian erasure of ancestral practices and memory. As part of this storyworld, Ensouled foregrounds the survival of communities that are most often underrepresented in mainstream media and visions into the futures of those who have survived and thrived since time immemorial.

CREATOR'S NOTE

Ensouled is visionary fiction as conceptualized by Walidah Imarisha, in how it “pulls from real life experience, inequalities and movement building to create innovative ways of understanding the world around us, paint visions of new worlds that could be, and teach us new ways of interacting with one another."

This work feels especially timely because it highlights the impacts and significance of the potential loss of our elders during this time of pandemic. As keepers of ancestral and healing knowledge, the gravity of this loss is quite potent for many diasporic and migrant communities whose elders are/were their only connection to home-culture, ancestral memory, the healing of intergenerational relationships, skillshares, recipes, and so on.

Another important piece to note is about the “practitioners of magic” in Ensouled, which were developed through a creative mish-mashing of my own familial stories of those who experienced the genocide, and other stories of the lives of women who did or did not survive (picked up from historical books, memoirs, museums, oral histories told to me through family-friends and community members). I intentionally do not call them witches. In fact, they are known as whisperers in the story, because they secretly communicate with plants. They use one specific plant to communicate with each other, much like pirate radio. The plant is actually the Boswellia tree, which is where Frankincense comes from. Armenians call it khoung, and it is burned as part of rituals across SWANA cultures. I imagine the whisperers as the keepers and stewards of these trees, those who harvest sacred sap for ritual. All that said, although there are no explicit historical accounts of Armenian witches per say, over the years I have heard of countless practices and examples within my own culture that resonate as witchcraft (as in, folks healing themselves and others with agency and prowess and rigour).

As a last note, I'd like to highlight that Ensouled is really a project that belongs to a larger body of work I've been chipping away at for some time now alongside many other friends and collaborators, who also do the work of imagining, collecting, reclaiming, researching into seemingly lost ancestral knowledge, those who practice in the magical, spiritual and healing realms of Armenian and SWANA cultures. Some examples are: SWANA Ancestral Hub, Mer Tachar, Entangled Roots Press, and the work of Levon Kafafian.

SPECIAL THANKS

First and foremost, to lee williams boudakian for co-creating above and beyond the World of Q storyworld with me (this would not exist without you). To Emily Mkrtichian, whose support pushed this writing forward into near-completion (nothing is ever complete). To Lerna Ekmekcioglu, whose expertise sharpened the historical aspects of this story. To Nyree, Milena, Karena, Sevan, Gabe, Karine, Levon, lee, and both Emily's for providing me with feedback on the first few drafts. To Giorgia Nardin Ohanessian, who taught me about how important it is to jiggle our fat, and about love in the time of diaspora. To Taleen Voskuni for teaching me about the publishing world. To the many and mighty queers and women in my life (including the artists and writers who I never actually met, because your work is the sunshine to my photosynthesis), who have relentlessly supported our survivance and thrivance for a millenia. To my only descendant, Saana, who came into my life and cracked me open and expanded my being in ways I could never have predicted or imagined. To Spencer and all my parents, who have made this work possible in countless ways, primarily in the caring of Saana while I wrote this damn thing and worked on a million grants to fund it. To the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, who supported this project through its many iterations.

Lastly, to the constellation of ancestors whose memories live in my bones, the surface of which I have barely scratched. They whisper their stories to me in my dreams, and dream with me still. I invoke them in the smell of coffee with cardamom and there is no such thing as too much garlic and yes you can make jam with roses. I grow them in my garden and so did our SWANA kin with whom I commit to building solidarity with on a daily basis. To all our grandmothers and their grandmothers as well, who sowed the seeds of my liberation, liberation that is both theirs and ours, this life, and this work, that is both theirs and ours.

CREDITS

Creator: Kamee Abrahamian
Illustrator: Lorik Khodaverdian
Web Designer: Nikki Makagiansar

Special thanks to the Canada Arts Council & Ontario Arts Council for supporting this project.