Since the first great dispersion started after the year 1045, the Armenian people have gone through multiple and varied forms of migration and exile. The diversity of words used in the Armenian language to name the diaspora, according to Khachich Tölölyan, is a testimony to and a result of this plurality of experiences. Spurk, arderkir, tz’ronk, gharib, gaghut -suggestively related to the Hebrew term galut- are each related to different moments and modes of life in foreign lands. The lexical proliferation is a mark of this complex and multilayered history. A plurality to be associated not so much with lack and longing, but with the vitality and dynamism of the diasporic condition. A dispersion, as any other dissemination, acquires through language a fecund meaning. As if spreading seeds, migration allows the expansion of cultural artefacts and values and turns the diaspora into a fertile space. The word, this portative treasure able to extend, adapt, and be fruitful in remote places, enabled those moments of great cultural development that Armenian communities enjoyed around the world. Thus, the first newspaper written in Armenian language, published in Madras, India in 1794, is a sign of this vitality and shows how common shared culture offered spaces to recreate itself and, hence, symbolic realms to inhabit. This permanent recreation of Armenian existence in the diaspora, together with the increasing discrediting of the concepts of “nation” and “identity”, nowadays displaced by notions such as global deterritorialization and cultural hybridity, led to the current turn to the idea of Armenia as a transnation. The diaspora can be no longer viewed as exile and orphanhood, a peripheric missing of the distant homeland, but rather as a net which includes, but exceeds, the physical Armenian territory; not a geographically located place, but the collective weaving of an endless web. Not a promise projected to the future but a permanent construction today.

To acknowledge the creative potential implicit in the diaspora does not mean to ignore the destructive force displayed in it by persecution and extermination. The memory of the genocide is, as well as the word, a fundamental trace in the permanent weaving of the transnation. Along with the diasporic experience and the key role of the lettered tradition, this shows the affinity between the Armenian and the Jewish peoples. As in the legacy of the Shoah, the duty to remember parallels the challenge of recreating the collective identity beyond the evocation of the death, of finding positive ways to bind the sense of cultural belonging. The curatorial work of “Under construction” takes care of this rich and complex heritage in a responsible and loving manner. The artists' commitment, initiated already as an exchange platform on the web - a powerful resource and altogether a metaphor for this rhizomatic construction of the transnation - proposes images which do not claim the univocity and solidity of national symbols, but aim to be like strings composing a plot. Their work could not have found a better shelter than the walls of a monastery which was the site of flourishing Armenian cultural life. And not a better place than Venice, a port which was hospitable to a prosperous community in accordance with its mercantile lineage and its character of exchange knot between distant worlds. For as the water city, collective identity does not rely on firm ground, but on a copious archipelago, crossed by numerous canals like bonds weaving a never ending web.