Armenia (Republic of) 2025

Title: Microarchitecture through Al: Making New Memories with Ancient Monuments
Commissioner: Svetlana Sahakyan, Director of the Department of Modern Art in the Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sport
Curator: Marianna Karapetyan
Exhibitors: Electric Architects, TUMO Center for Creative Technologies, Ari Melenciano, CALFA, and Monumed

The pavilion brings attention to the challenges facing cultural heritage today, particularly loss through climate change, conflict, and neglect, while exploring how emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence may offer new methods for preservation and reinterpretation. At the core of the exhibition is a generative AI model trained on the Armenian Heritage Scanning Project developed by TUMO, a comprehensive archive of digitized Armenian architectural sites. Rather than simply documenting existing monuments, the AI generates new spatial compositions that reinterpret the forms, motifs, and material logic of endangered or vanished structures. These digital outputs are translated into physical form by carving them into tuff stone, a material historically embedded in Armenian architecture.