The Book of genocides

The Book of Genocides, an interactive art installation and a conceptual work of graphic creative nonfiction (a work-in-progress), provides a framework that unites all genocides across space and time to show its ongoing presence, to heal from it, and to end it. The original installation, made in 2016, illustrated nine genocides of the past five hundred years: The First Peoples of the Americas, Black Americans, Indigenous Australians, Armenians, The Holocaust, the Cambodian Killing Fields, the Tutsi in Rwanda, the Bosnian Genocide, and the Rohingya Genocide in Myanmar.

 Created on the altered pages of a mid-twentieth century zoology text that had belonged to my brown-skinned mother when she was a graduate student, each section begins with a portrait of a person from that genocide’s inception. Pages are cut into thirds—the head, the torso, and the legs—to create a turn-the-flap book that can generate 2,187 versions of that story of genocide. Turning each third of a page separately transforms the images back and forth between human, beast, predator, vermin, parasite and various chimera mirroring what might take place in someone’s mind as they dehumanize another person. Metric markings around each human portrait reflect the deep histories of medical experimentation and scientific racism that accompany genocide.  The page opposite each drawing reprints an extract from the zoology textbook redacted in such a way as to amplify each genocide’s story. The images and redactions reflect the hate rhetoric, history, myths, and local details of each genocide.

 For the book manuscript, an overarching illustrated introduction precedes the nine exquisite corpse sections and an illustrated essay and hand-drawn fact sheet accompanies each of them.  An additional graphic essay “The Borders of Genocide” exploring the politics of labeling given the ongoing violence in Syria, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Yemen, Congo, Ukraine, and Palestine follows the exquisite corpse section along with a personal epilogue “Forgiveness and Reparations”.  This project is rooted in my experience as an Armenian American, an identity shaped by genocide and the privileged status of Whiteness that Armenians received in US courts in the early twentieth century.