Through a combination of circumstances and the course of events, the photographic investigation has become the form that Rebecca Topakiana has adopted. As early as 2014, in Jericho, she was documenting the mystery of the city said to be the oldest in the world; in response to ancestral tales, she gathered photographic clues—temporal ellipses that brought together, within the frame of the image, the symbolic and the trivial, time immemorial and the present moment of the encounter. Since then, she has focused on telling a more personal story: that of her Armenian family, exiled from Turkey due to persecution. To address the dense and traumatic subject matter of this long-silenced family history, she first turns to fiction. With *Dame Gulizar And Other Love Stories* (2017–2019), she begins with the love story of her grandparents. From the chivalrous elements of the story as it has been passed down to her, she sketches the broad outlines of a narrative drawing on mythology, a form that already blends family archives with footage shot in Armenia. In 2021, the artist began *The Embers of Constantinople Must Fly All the Way to Europe*, this time aiming to encompass the entire family history. With a single artistic gesture, she gathers the scattered fragments—rare documents and sparse accounts—and takes them there to perhaps, if not set the family history straight, at least set her own narrative straight and, by extension, help restore the narrative of the Armenian Genocide. Her genealogical research takes her to Istanbul, Talas, and Anatolia in search of her family’s village, bringing her into contact with Armenians living in Turkey today. Short texts caption the photographs; like the images themselves, they are devoid of pathos and stick to the reality that stands before them, to what remains: youth, a gravestone in a cemetery, and—despite history—flags and racist graffiti in the streets and on the walls of already devastated villages. Patiently, the artist continues her work, recording, assembling, and keeping alive the embers of memory.
After studying philosophy and geography, Rebecca Topakian (b. 1989) turned to photography. She graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie in Arles in 2015 and is based in Paris, where she is a resident artist at the Poush! Manifesto studios.
