"Marine Manasian, an Armenian innovative artist: voice and courage of return" by Carlo Coppola
photo by Thomas Forestier It happens, in the lives of some artists, that nostalgia stops being a wound and becomes working material. For Marine Manasian , singer-songwriter and performer born in Yerevan and raised between Armenia and Russia , that moment coincided with a precise decision: to return. The Greeks called it Nostos , the return; Homer devoted The Odyssey to it, while contemporary cinema has offered one of its most intense interpretations with Vozvraščenie (The Return, 2003) by Andrey Zvyagintsev. Marine's biography has been marked since childhood by a continuous crossing of borders. Born in Yerevan, she grew up moving repeatedly between Armenia and Russia, living for a long time in Moscow . This experience of migration, of adapting to different languages and cultures, is not simply a biographical fact, but the very matrix of her artistic sensibility. She began writing songs at seventeen, after receiving a guitar as a gift; she later studied piano and improvisation a...
