No, the above image is not a still from a horror film. It's a babushka on her way to a depressing budget supermarket as the storm began to yet again roll on in. Darkness already swallowing up the streets, with little light spilling from the remaining open businesses. Today I roamed the streets a little after picking something up from WildBerries (a sort of Russian version of Amazon but not as good). After, I felt the need to take a little more of a walk and get some fresh air, knowing it would again rain more and the storm would take over the entire evening. I walked through old streets that were riddled with Soviet era apartment buildings, more interested in hte traditional life that Armenia still holds. The truth is, I feel nothing when I walk through the globalism modernism of today. It's soulless, too clean, too void of life that shows stories within. These rustic apartment buildings that barely look safe to live in have so much story to them even from the outside. So many signs of families living, so much culture that ends up visible on the outside.
Workers in the area push things by cart, clothing hangs from above given the lack of space inside to dry them. Cables tangled up all over hang in a mutual chaos. The cars speak of a different time, small and boxed shape for the most part, though here and there you can see a few newer ones. I love this side of the world. The history, the feeling that here little has changed. Even in the way in which people decorate their homes. By the way, as I write this now at 3AM, the sound of heavy rain can be heard.
I have a lot of sadness when I walk through such areas, however. Sometimes I love the architecture and the beauty of these buildings, but I can't help but feel that I have discovered them a little too late. That I was born at a time in which I wasn't capable of seeing these spaces in their truest form. The lingering feeling that it's only a matter of time until many of them are knocked down and replaced with something far worse. There is an abandoned apartment building in the area that I sometimes check out, I'll post more about it tomorrow, but it's at the point in which it's evident it could fall down at any moment. Spiral stairs on the outside have no support, I tried to walk up them and could feel the vibrations of my steps bounce into the column. The main stairs in side have no support either, the same feeling. Unsafe, ready to crumble under any sort of weight. Battered over time by the forces of nature given how its interior is exposed. But the space has so much beauty to it. This sums up a lot of Armenia. A feeling of comfort, beauty in the surroundings, but the threat that it's living on borrowed time now.
A lot of the world feels lost, this pursuit for endless growth at the expense of all things that give our nations meaning. Tradition and beauty is abandoned for a similarity in everything that creates a void. I never want to return to such areas that have fully sold themselves for profit.
There's something about the rustic that brings me comfort. I mentioned how it tells story, how it feels more authentic. But I can't help but feel there is more to it than that. Perhaps it's that history deeply connects us with those before us, gives us appreciation for those who once walked through such spaces and shared certain ideologies. The ways in which they left something of impact behind that they believed in that is still heavily evident to this day. A genuine case of being remembered in time. And so few locations now feel this way, with that more clean look that removes a lot of the past. Though this isn't even a past I have any connection to. I wasn't born here, my relatives are not from here. Nor were my ancestors. Yet such places are capable of speaking to us in a different manner. I can't help but think this is heavily important for our growth both as a species and as individuals. To be more considerate and accept differences in each other, something that comes with culture around the world.
Perhaps this is where the sadness comes in. The feeling that the loss of all of this, the old way in pursuit of the modern, is something that shouldn't be accepted and forgotten. How the signs of the old ways are left behind for us to roam around and imagine within our own minds rather than witness with our eyes. Markets now empty, rarely appreciated by locals.
All of this makes me wish that I could find a place that almost feels frozen in time, a place that still feels so old and rustic, still full of its identity, and not a place that feels as if it's dying, at its last legs. I don't know how this happened to me, to have this feeling of belonging in such spaces that don't have that modernisation, to almost feel as if I belong in the past somewhere. There's no doubt that many of us these days are lost, and perhaps some of this craziness of how our nations pursue growth is the outcome. A people now growing up void of identity. Their cultures replaced with something that looks identical thousands of miles away in another land. A modern (no pun intended) tragedy, in my opinion. And perhaps this is why I love to roam the streets so much with the camera under any weather. To pursue the past, to walk steps of those before me and discover little relics of eras that are slowly being tucked away more and more.
With intent to capture it all on camera. To share it with the world and find ways to increase that awareness of what we're all throwing away.