Parrhesia Collective was founded in 2021, at a time when we discovered ways of meeting with each other through various means of communication during the times of the pandemic. Our posts, which started by focusing on colonialism, gender and temporality on social media, evolved into conversations that were carried to webinars over time. In this first article of ours, we wanted to introduce the members of the collective and share how the spirit of the collective resonates with each of our members, through the posts we shared on the program of Açık Radyo, Hikayenin Her Hali (Stories in All Forms held on December 16, 2022). When we look at the etymology of the word collective, we find the explanation of "expressing a whole consisting of many individuals in a singular form". Parrhesia members are women who work in the fields of history, sociology, architecture, art, dance, literature, education and philosophy. Although each of them has different motivations for their presence in the collective, as Talin Suciyan puts it, "we all intertwine our non-belonging and floating to a certain extent and form a network. And this network holds us together."Parrhesia has been and continues to be a place where we, as Armenian women, share intellectual exchanges as well as issues of womanhood, friendship, mourning and melancholy. And we are trying to make this impossible existence possible by multiplying our own words, artistic productions and research. We are also happy that we will reach out to the readers and share our activities in this space that Agos newspaper provided us with every fortnight.
For the collective, the creation of a space for intellectual interaction in the Armenian language stands out. The presence and contributions of one of our members, Araz Kojayan, who lives in Lebanon, is invaluable. Araz's command of Western Armenian, as well as her invitation to us to use Armenian as a language of discussion and generate ideas in our meetings, challenges many of us in a sweet way, and at the same time makes us happy. As Sesil Artuç puts it: "Unfortunately, for obvious reasons, there are not many public spaces where you can keep the Armenian language alive, and more importantly, where you can live and exist in Armenian, and on top of that, where you can discuss literature, Armenian history, and more than that, social sciences and philosophy. If you agree with the idea that producing in the Armenian language has a political meaning, Parrhesia is an important space." Tamar Gürciyan also expresses the impact of sharing an intellectual space in the Armenian language on her inner world as follows: "I think that every language carries and emphasizes a different identity. When it came to expressing myself in Armenian, I discovered the existence of another Tamar, a Tamar from the past. And with this Tamar, I realized that other Tamars can exist simultaneously." For Narod Dabanyan, the question "How can we conduct philosophical discussions in Western Armenian in a historical context" stands out. Meri Tek emphasizes the importance of the space opened by the collective by saying, "It is a great and important experience for women who research and produce intellectual and cultural research in the Armenian society to come together and, more importantly, to offer us such a space."
An important theme that came to the fore in our conversation was the subject of feeling at home. Lerna Babikyan's description of the collective resonated with all of us: "Parrhesia collective is like a house that is both familiar and unfamiliar to me, whose lost pieces have come together and started to be renewed". For Lerna, there was a great cleansing and relief in the meeting space, which we can call home: "In this house, I saw women engaged in a feverish cleaning process, shedding light on the experiences that have been passed down from generation to generation, untouched for more than a hundred years, gathering dust, whose existence may have been forgotten or made to be forgotten - the offended, angry and wise parts of us that we are not even aware of. As lost words and concepts resurfaced, just like lost people and their voices, we were relieved and actually found ourselves and our authentic selves." Tamar echoed Lerna's words with the following sentence: "I found a habitat that I had been needing for a long time but didn't realize it". Araz reminded us that a sense of belonging is also an unmet need and shared the following feelings: "The sense of belonging is important for me. Probably for all of us. But for me it is an existential question. As a Diaspora Armenian, I spent my whole life answering the question 'Are you more Armenian or Lebanese?' I found myself in a constant encounter and struggle with the question of belonging. This place, where I belonged in Parrhesia, was the place where I felt this belonging most strongly. If there was one place I would like to live, it would be the Parrhesia collective." Silva Bingaz shares that she sees the collective as "an institution that helps me understand a grief and melancholy that I cannot get out of me". All of these reflections tell us how the desire to feel at home and belong to a place, which we find difficult to find a response to, is somehow finding an answer through the collective.
Parrhesia has been and continues to be a place where we, as Armenian women, share intellectual exchanges as well as issues of womanhood, friendship, mourning and melancholy. As Talin puts it, "It is an impossible project for us to exist as Armenian women, to be productive women in the diaspora." And we are trying to make this impossible existence possible by multiplying our own words, artistic productions and research. We are also happy that we will reach out to the readers and share our activities in this space that Agos newspaper provided us with every fortnight.