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 at the Moscow College of Improvisational Music. In Moscow she founded the project Deep Image, which over time evolved from a collective formation into a mostly solo path: today that name belongs above all to one phase of her research, while Marine presents herself as a fully independent artist.
But her artistic story cannot be told as a simple trajectory from the street to the stage. If anything, it's the opposite. Marine already had years of concerts, performances and experimental projects behind her when, in 2019, she began performing on the street. The choice to bring her music into public squares did not, therefore, arise from the need to build a stage language, but from the desire to step outside her comfort zone, test herself, and experience a different way of living and relating to an audience. It was not the street that shaped her stage sound: it was Marine who brought to the street the sound she had already developed on stages, carrying her own instruments with her each time.
After years of activity spanning concerts, street performances and experimental projects, the decision to move permanently to Yerevan thus matured as an act of reconnection with her own roots, a true "bridge," to use her own words.
Her style moves through meditative, electro-pop, psychedelic, rock and ethnic territories, with lyrics in Armenian, Russian, French and English. For her, music is an instrument of spiritual elevation and identity narration. Many of her songs — from Arevi Voski to 1303, up to Hayastanin, inspired by Yeghishe Charents — are threaded through with references to Armenia, its history, the diaspora, and Armenian poetry, in particular Charents and Paruyr Sevak.
Alongside Armenia and Russia, however, there is another fundamental place in her artistic geography: France. There she has worked extensively, publishing her album 1303 — built entirely on Charents' poems — with the French label SUXEED; she has performed in various cities, taken part in television and radio programs, collaborated with other artists, and appeared in a film made by French directors about Artsakh. An experience that helped further broaden her outlook, drawing it out of an exclusively Armenian dimension and placing it within a wider European and diasporic space.
To this path is added an even deeper and more radical chapter: her journey to Turkey, undertaken not as memory tourism, but as a direct confrontation with the places tied to the Armenian Genocide. There she sang Armenian songs in spaces where the language and memory had long been silenced and suppressed. This action well summarizes her stance: personal, often radical, and not necessarily coinciding with official narratives or with the institutional rhetoric circulating in Armenia. Her response, however, does not pass through ideological confrontation, but through music, which becomes a space where memory, identity, individual experience and freedom can coexist.
We met Marine Manasian and she told us about this dialectic — between street and stage, between Moscow, Paris and Yerevan, between the poetry of Charents and the Turkish sites of memory, between the desire to return and the need to keep departing — with the naturalness of someone who has turned her own biography into a musical coming-of-age story.
She has done so above all through her music, whose emotions are difficult, perhaps impossible, to translate into words. For Marine, return is thus not a conclusion, but one of the many forms of the journey. Her artistic identity is born precisely from the tension between different places, different languages and memories that are sometimes irreconcilable. It is in this tension that she finds her voice: a deeply Armenian voice, yet not closed within a single narrative; a voice capable of moving through memory without letting itself be imprisoned by it.
