Marine Petrossian

I’m planning to write a very long text, kind of chronicle of my days. It will connect details of everyday incidents with my thoughts and memories and focus mainly on my vision of the place of poetry – and of me as a poet − in the changing world.

IN THE CAPITAL OF FORMER EMPIRE

The poems I write mostly have a factual element in them -  places I have visited, people I have seen, things that have happened to me. My stay in MuseumsQuartier, April May 2013,  was very productive in this sense. I wrote a series of poems called “In the Capital of Former Empire”.
During my stay in MuseumsQuartier, I wrote a status in my Facebook page which said: “They gave me money, they gave me Vienna, and they told me – enjoy it. Communism does not seem impossible to me anymore”. Sure, it was a joke, but as famous proverb puts it – there's a grain of truth in every joke. When I returned home, I wrote an essay in my blog, entitled “Inconsistent  Thoughts about Communism”. Here is an excerpt from it:
“Everything started two months ago, with a status I wrote while in Vienna:  They gave me money, they gave me Vienna, and they told me – enjoy it. Communism does not seem impossible to me anymore. It was a joke of course, but there is a grain of truth in every joke. A note for those who did not study communism at school: communism is a possible social order where people work according to their abilities and wishes and receive according to their needs. That is to say, during communism work is not a way to earn money, but a way of self-expression. In Vienna, things were exactly like that: they had invited me to an artistic residence right in the center of city, they had given me a sum quite sufficient for a stay of two months, and I was on my own. Sure, I wrote a series of poems in Vienna, but the money I got was not at all a pay for the poems: I wrote them, because I wanted to write them, my work was not obligatory, it was absolutely free. Writing poetry is the main work I do all my life, but it is not the work I do to earn my living. Thus, one of the characteristics of communism - working according to ones abilities and wishes – has been with me all my life. In Vienna, the second characteristic was also there – “I received according to my needs”, I had everything I needed. That is why I recalled the concept of communism.”

Marine Petrossian, Armenia
Artist-in-Residence at MuseumsQuartier, May-April 2013