"Yerevan Pauses to Reflect on One of Its Most Important Artistic Legacies" by Carlo Coppola
"Un film di Kochar per ricordare il maestro della scultura armena Ara Harutyunyan" articolo di Carlo Coppola apparso su "In Città Giovinazzo" diretto da papas Antonio Calisi:
https://www.incittagiovinazzo.it/2026/09/06/un-film-di-kochar-per-ricordare-il-maestro-della-scultura-armena-ara-harutyunyan/
On September 9, starting at 6:30 PM, the Mouradick Art Center (77 Loris-Melikov Street) will screen Heritage: Ara Harutyunyan, a documentary by acclaimed Armenian director Ruben Kochar — son of artist Yerevand Kochar — dedicated to the sculptor who gave shape to the monumental memory of contemporary Armenia.
The film belongs to a deeper effort to preserve and give new life to Armenian cultural memory. Weaving together precious archival footage with close, deliberate camerawork, it examines the sculptor's immense visual and social impact, offering — in the production's own words — not a mere catalogue of works, but the very "matter" of the sculptures themselves: an emotional bridge between the public and the urban space where these works continue to live. Kochar does not simply document the monuments; he studies them up close, restoring their three-dimensionality, their weight, their surface — as though stone and bronze could still speak of the hands that shaped them.
Ara Harutyunyan (1928–1999) was a People's Artist of the Armenian SSR, a professor, and one of the most influential figures of the Soviet and post-Soviet Armenian period. He quite literally redrew the skyline of Yerevan and other cities: his is the colossal, 22-meter Mother Armenia, which replaced a monument to the Soviet leader Stalin and now dominates the capital as a symbol of resilience, peace, and the defense of the homeland. His too are the monumental sculptures of the Sardarapat complex — including the celebrated winged bulls — commemorating the historic 1918 battle for independence. And his are the reliefs of the Sundukyan Theatre and the Erebuni Museum, where ancient medieval Armenian decorative traditions merge with the modernist plasticity of the twentieth century.
Edited by Artur Parsyan and produced by Susanna Harutyunyan, Grigor Akhinov, and Narine Kochar, the documentary unfolds as a narrative that is at once intimate and monumental — very much in keeping with Kochar's own artistic trajectory as a director attentive to the relationship between public art and collective consciousness, able to turn the language of cinema into a tool of historical inquiry.
A public discussion on Harutyunyan's legacy is planned at the close of the screening. This is not, then, a simple nostalgic retrospective, but an occasion to reflect on two open questions. On one hand, there is the role of art as a pillar of identity in a period of continuous geopolitical change for Armenia — where rediscovering Harutyunyan means rediscovering the roots of a people, and his figures of stone and bronze reveal themselves as true custodians of collective consciousness. On the other, there is the transmission of memory itself, with cinema transforming stone into a permanent audiovisual archive — one capable of speaking to new generations and feeding the ongoing debate over monument preservation and the evolution of public art.
Admission is by invitation only, reserved for a small community of scholars, artists, and cultural professionals. It is a format built for dialogue rather than for a wide audience — but it is often in gatherings like this one, small and focused, that the most important battle for the preservation of Armenian cultural memory is truly fought.
Carlo Coppola
