After the Forty days of Musa Dagh, the Franz Werfel’s work of 1933, and after the recent fame of Antonia Arslan from La masseria delle allodole , 1915 The Armenian Files – a record, an exhibition and a radio opera by Roberto Paci Dalò – digs in ulcers of a tragic event that prefigures Hitler’s mass deportations. In fact, in 1915, one-and-a-half million Armenians were deported and eliminated by the Turkish Ottoman Empire. This is the fierce, crazy figure of the Armenian genocide.
This cruel unsolved chapter of our history is not only a source of literary inspiration, but represents, above all, the object of disputes and discussions opposed by Turkish denial.
“Fortunately, Paci Dalò is not a historian but an eccentric artist. Composer, director, performer raised under the totem of John Cage”, how La Voce recites.
In an interview for the same newspaper, the artist confesses that, although his strategical work’s publication in the same year of the centenary, 1915 The Armenian Files is not a pure and simple commemoration of the mournful event. Not surprisingly, Paci Dalò has been working on the Armenian genocide since the 1980s.
“The record” says the artist, “attempts a fatal fusion between the poems of Daniel Varoujan” Armenian poet tremendously killed skinned alive after his deportation from Constantinople, and “the references to Armenian traditional music with today’s electronic sounds “.
1915 The Armenian Files was been appreciated by the Ambassador of the Republic of Armenia for not being a work with a nostalgic-celebrative allure, but a crucial work of dissemination. Paci Dalò uses electronics as mean of divulgation and propagation. Electronic music is, for him, a sounding board for a wider audience.
The record is co-produced by Arthub Shanghai and by the Embassy of the Armenian Republic in Italy.
“I have some problems with Erdogan” emphasizes Paci Dalò. He does not care about political quarrels. For him “talking about a hundred years ago” is “how to take a Polaroid of December 2015. There is a Russian-Turkish conflict, there is the deportation of the Armenians, so we have a lot of affinity with the genocide of refugees darkly implemented in these months. It is so natural to ask ourselves: what period are we reliving? “. Hoping to prevent “further genocides”, the 1915 work The Armenian Files is also composed with “survivors’ voices”. On the record, the reciting voice is that of Boghos Levon Zekiyan, professor at the Ca’ Foscari in Venice, appointed by the Pope Francis in 2014 Archbishop of Istanbul.
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