About
ZaBell is an independent editorial-cultural inquiry platform developed from Yerevan through long-form conversations, moving-image documentation, and archival research.
The project examines how contemporary systems shape perception, visibility, memory, language, and social reality across cultural, technological, political, and institutional contexts.
Its work unfolds through recorded conversations, textual framing, documentary image sequences, and multilingual circulation across different public and editorial environments.
Context
Contemporary life is increasingly shaped by systems operating faster than public understanding. Visibility circulates independently from depth. Information fragments across platforms, institutions, and competing realities. Cultural production is compressed into accelerated cycles of performance, exposure, and disappearance.
ZaBell develops conversations inside these conditions.
The project approaches culture not as commentary or promotion, but as a site where larger social, technological, linguistic, and political tensions become visible through lived experience, artistic practice, research, and public thought.
Armenia
ZaBell operates from Armenia not as a symbolic location, but as a concentrated contemporary environment where questions of language, memory, instability, displacement, mediation, and institutional transformation become sharply observable.
The project approaches Armenia as an analytical site through which broader international conditions can be examined at human scale.
Contributors
ZaBell develops conversations with writers, artists, translators, researchers, curators, filmmakers, musicians, publishers, theorists, and other cultural practitioners working across systems shaping contemporary perception, knowledge, identity, and public life.
Contributors are invited not as representatives of disciplines, but as participants positioned within conditions, structures, and transformations under discussion.
Language
ZaBell operates across Armenian, English, and Western Armenian linguistic environments.
Language functions within the project not only as communication, but as a structure shaping memory, perception, translation, continuity, and cultural legibility across different publics and geographies.
Selected materials circulate through multilingual subtitles, translated extracts, editorial adaptations, and archival publication formats.
Programme Structure
ZaBell develops long-form conversations organized through thematic cycles examining systems shaping contemporary cultural and social life.
Each cycle brings together contributors working across different artistic, institutional, linguistic, technological, and geopolitical contexts.
The project maintains a deliberately restrained editorial structure emphasizing duration, attention, precision, and continuity of thought.
Visual and Archival Materials
Alongside recorded conversations, ZaBell develops a parallel visual and archival layer consisting of documentary photography, production materials, textual fragments, research traces, and moving-image documentation.
These materials function as part of the project’s broader editorial and archival structure rather than promotional accompaniment.
Institutional Context
ZaBell develops through collaborations, dialogues, and exchanges across cultural institutions, editorial platforms, research environments, translation networks, and artistic infrastructures operating between Armenia and broader international contexts.
The project’s development has been supported by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation alongside ongoing collaborations across editorial, research, and audiovisual environments.
ZaBell is conceived as a portable editorial format capable of operating across different institutional, linguistic, and geographic contexts while maintaining structural continuity.
Founder and Editor
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Ani Asatryan is an Armenian writer and editor working across literature, editorial research, and cross-disciplinary cultural production. Working from Yerevan, her practice examines questions of perception, language, memory, visibility, and contemporary systems of meaning through writing, long-form inquiry, audiovisual formats, and archival structures.
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Following her studies at the University of Sussex in England, Asatryan founded and developed ZaBell in Yerevan as an editorial-cultural inquiry platform operating through conversations, audiovisual documentation, multilingual circulation, and archival development.
Asatryan's work has appeared in Asymptote Journal, Words Without Borders, and Absinthe: World Literature in Translation. Her work has been taught at University of California, Berkeley, American University of Armenia, and University of Basel, and her texts are held in the collections of New York Public Library, Columbia University Libraries, and University of Michigan.
Founder and Editor
Ani Asatryan is an Armenian writer, editor, and cultural practitioner working across literature, translation, research-based media, and long-form editorial inquiry.
Her work has appeared in in publications including Asymptote Journal, Words Without Borders, and Absinthe: World Literature in Translation and has been taught at institutions including University of California, Berkeley, American University of Armenia, and University of Basel. She is a Chevening Scholar and has held residencies and collaborations across literary, artistic, and research contexts in Armenia and internationally.
ZaBell emerges from her ongoing work across language, narrative systems, perception, memory, and contemporary cultural conditions.
Credits