Deanna and Bengi were introduced in Istanbul in September 2015, soon
discovering that their families hail from the same village in Turkey,
today known as Çüngüş. Deanna was born in New York, the descendant of
Melik Cachoian, who escaped Çüngüş before the Armenian Genocide.
Bengi, born in Turkey, learned that her great-grandfather Güllü Bey
was the primary perpetrator of genocide in the same village.
Since their meeting, Deanna and Bengi have sought to share, reimagine,
and confront their intertwined family stories. Using oral histories,
archival materials, architectural ruins, inherited objects, and poems,
their collaboration challenges the rigid binaries of victim and
perpetrator. Their project, echoing themes of transmission,
resistance, and reinvention, explores how two young women—Armenian and
Turkish—engage with a painful past to create new dialogues of
understanding.
Their project’s title, Չünքüşաbaտum | Çüngüşabadoum, blends Armenian
and Turkish, inspired by the Armenian-language ethnography
Chunkoushabadoum, a rare book published in Jerusalem in 1976. This
very book, an archive of their village’s forgotten past, became the
symbolic cornerstone of their collaborative research.
