Tunnel di boschi, passaggi di parole. La casa di Mariam Petrosjan

Mariam Petrosyan, painter, graphic artist and cartoonist, transcends three alphabets embedded in the map of Europe: Cyrillic, Armenian, Latin. This article focuses on her novel, Dom v kotorom ... (The house that ...), published in Russian in 2009. The book collects imaginary life stories of disabled children, separated from their families, and living together in the ‘House’. Similar to jugglers and circus artists, they experience infinite changes, showing the complete 'otherness' of their existence through their bodies marked by difficulties but at the same time able to fly, to spit fire, to pass through walls. The novel is intertwined with the dissolution of the Soviet union, the rise of new borders and the emergence of new questions about the role of the human beings and its self-recognition in the contemporary world. Like acrobats and dancers portrayed by Chagall (himself in transit, as the Armenian writer, among different languages and lands) Petrosian’s characters inhabit a space ‘in between’ both personal and general history. The contradictory semblance of the clown, the different meanings that each of his incarnations contain, just like art, becomes "a tangible sign of a passion from elsewhere or that to elsewhere seeks".