Series of rendered photogrammetry scans capturing the ruins of Armenian and Georgian churches in Kars, northeast Turkey.

If churches grew from seeds, perhaps you would think the chapels and monasteries in the Kars region of present-day Turkey were carried by the winds or on the fur of a wild animal, across the border from Armenia. They are scattered throughout the landscape, erupting from fields and valleys. Of course, this is not correct, these Medieval Armenian churches are human-made, they were grown from stone and mortar, and they have existed on the land long before lines of contemporary states were drawn and the national border fences were constructed. But maybe, if churches did grow from seeds, you would wonder why haven’t they grown so well here? Why are their roofs misshapen, their walls arching towards the ground?

The scans were produced during field research, funded by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, and undertaken as part of my master’s thesis titled ‘The Armenian Ruins of kars: Mapping for Expanded Narratives of a Contested Borderland’ (Kadir Has University, Istanbul). The work is exhibited as part of the Creative Action Coalition’s ‘Cogs in The Machine: Breaking the Mechanisms of Oppression’ exhibition.