Abstract

Home­com­ing is an artis­tic-ethno­graphic pro­ject about the her­itage and artist’s re­la­tion­ship to the vil­lage of Khi­nalig. Lo­cated in north Azer­bai­jan, Khi­nalig is home to an In­dige­nous mi­nor­ity that speaks a unique lan­guage. Nilya, an artist of Khi­nalig ori­gin, ex­plores the nu­ances of dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion and in­sti­tu­tion­al­i­sa­tion and asks herself how a trained de­signer can help the com­mu­nity over­come these is­sues.

Khinalig, the village on the mountain, was too isolated and remote for archaeologists and museologists, so the first excavations started only around 2010. Nowadays, there are three museums: one governmental and two initiated by the residents. The residents curate these museums by themselves, and so far, there is little to no interference from the government. It is not a white cube; you can touch and use some objects. There are unwritten stories about the things exhibited, the museum, the future of the village, and archaeological excavations.

Now that the village is slowly gaining the attention of tourists and researchers, how can one preserve the local initiatives and curatorial decisions, and most importantly, keep the objects where they were found? Maybe it is possible to build an alternative environment for those who want to research, publish, and exhibit?

Further details or updates on the project can be found here: homecoming.wishious.de/
Exhibition documentation video

Ouverture

I often ask myself — who am I, what do I look like, do I accept myself for who I am? These questions usually brought back some gray noise that I preferred to ignore, go to sleep, listen to music, or simply doomscroll. Like a kaleidoscope, multiple identities, physical and mental wanderings silently echo somewhere deep inside and subtly leave. There has always been an aim: to rush from one place and achievement to another, iron my shirts, polish my shoes and grades, perpetually move through days, milestones, and deadlines, survive neurosis, bitterly joke back to offensive commentaries, walk forward and never stop to reflect and hear the echoes.

Walking forward brought me far away from where my dad is, and his walking brought him further from his dad. My granddad was the first one who changed his ancestors’ way of moving through life from a circle to an arrow, he ran down the mountain, chose education over marriage, so did my dad, and so did I.

On the mountain there is a village and once my dad and I came back there, not expecting anything. Suddenly it all made sense: circular life motion — droving between the summer and winter pastures, counting years using sheep — this year was a year of 20000 sheep and the next one is a year of 50000 sheep, living on top of each other — your backyard is someone’s rooftop. Hidden echoes transformed into the sudden feeling of belonging, big and overwhelming. In this project I begin to unravel the unspeakable, indescribable, it is a gentle museum of collected, reflected and created matters. Through this project I continue my journey back home.

Timeline

Projects like this are not done in one day. They last for years with their ups and downs.

• August 2022 — first conscious visit to the village
• January 2023 — decided to make the project, offering locals to collaborate
• August 2023 – field trip to the village with a videographer
• October 2023 — talking with HfK professors, sending inquiries
• December 2024 — producing the first publication based on the personal archive
• March–October 2024 – moving to Berlin for an internship to get to know people from a similar field of research, writing drafts of the first publications
• June 2024 – second field trip to the village
• September 2024 – exhibiting the intermediate version of the project
• October–January 2024/2025 — supervising various strands of the project, mostly writing
• January–March 2025 — designing, and preparing bits of installation
• April 2025–onwards — exhibiting, documenting, disseminating

Project components

The project includes three key components:
-Collaborative Publications: Four books created in collaboration with local researchers were combined with the research text into one publication–project documentation.
-Digital Archive: A repository of archaeological findings.
-Art Installation: A reflective artistic presentation tying these threads together.

Through this work, I navigate the interplay between personal heritage and broader cultural preservation issues. I constantly shift between the researcher’s perspective and a deeper, more personal exploration through generations of family history.

Collaborative Publications

Monograph on Khinalig

I have prepared a monograph presenting some aspects of the life and history of Khinalig. The format and layout of this monograph are appropriations of the Census of India village survey books, a format used by post-colonial government administration workers. However, I have interpreted the rigid format as a basis for creating an overview book of Khinalig, an introduction for those who wish to learn more about the village. Each section briefly describes aspects of Khinalig: history, geography, social life, beliefs and heritage. The publication relies heavily on oral history and uses a looser approach to references, deliberately moving away from the strictly academic approach to sourcing knowledge.

Monograph spreads

Book on Khinalig Language

The Book on Khinalig Language is a book that reads like a collage, covering the origin of the indigenous language, its relations with other languages in the region, and its transformations from an oral to a written form through digitisation and design. My main motivation in talking about language was to cover the design and accessibility problems that inevitably arise when language does not have a consistent script. I first conducted textual research, ranging from internet searches to reading articles, and then extracted quotes from research papers and articles to support my narrative. I interviewed some experts in the field of type design and discussed the nuances of digitising unique scripts and creating typefaces for endangered languages.

Language book spreads

Publication based on researcher’s diary

During one of my travels to Khinalig, I found the diary of a villager who was composing the archaeological excursion hiking route. After his sudden death, relatives stored the diary in his family house but never read it. I deciphered, digitalized and translated the material in the diary and selected several excerpts. This work is a commentary on the information that gets lost in transliteration: the younger generations of Khinalig people cannot read the script their ancestors used to write their notes. The style of this book reflects the decay and fragility of ancestral knowledge.

Diary spreads

Book on archaeological findings

A publication about the archaeological excavations in Khinalig and the archaeological findings found there. The text is a translation of Izzet Bağirov’s scientific work, followed by a catalogue of photographs of archaeological findings.

Book on archaeological findings spreads

Theoretical part of Master Thesis

A theoretical part of the Homecoming project, is a text that tries to contextualise, describe and problematise the methods used in the project. Designed as a booklet and printed on risograph.

Thesis book spreads

Digital archive

The digital archive is a webpage that contains 3D scans of the findings with audio descriptions and a landing page about the project. The web archive focuses on imagining knowledge-sharing practices by creating a platform where locals in Khinalig can document and preserve their heritage.

Developed in collaboration with Aleksandra Voronina (web design) and Qianxun Chen (programming)
Website link

Installation

The installation was specifically created for the Master Thesis exhibition that took place from the 3rd until the 5th of April 2025. It has various parts linked to the project and includes many interactive pieces. Each of them is made of a different material but is united by one principle: the piece is not evident by itself and requires different ways of activation. Some pieces are publications, showcased in a special way, some contain photo or video material.

Stone and video

A big stone is located on a large wooden table. First, it is not so obvious, but an image is printed on a stone: it is an old photograph of my grandfather, who is from Khinalig and his children. A small screen is located under a big stone, embedded in the table itself. The screen shows a video footage of my first project trip to Khinalig, with a running subtitle line describing my vague thoughts. The text says:

comically small device trapped on a comically big table like a fly trapped in a sticky yellow tape dangling above our heads. how is it possible to dangle and push through simultaneously, this is what i never understood. why do i talk like a george costanza if i am from russia and to write messages in azerbaijani i sometimes use google translate. globalisation made me not alone in this boat — i bet in this room alone there are a couple of people with the story of double migration. i hope you feel seen, i hope you understand what. i mean i write this text very late, the fruits of homecoming labor are almost ripe — the juicy fruits of the contrast temperatures. many friends, half friends, total strangers will view this video and ask: whats with all this dangling? it is ok, my parents dangled, so did my grandparents, other ancestors living on the mountain had no time for such intricate self observation. thank you ancestors for making me strong and resilient, able to resist the smelly winds of art world, neoliberalism and schufa rating… enough with the mental exersise, i want to hear you. this project is a mirror through which you can see me but this is not important, what matters is the question how can we help each other in this individualist world. have each other’s back, remember what is important proximity and friendship and trust the action of one person, one who tries their best this person can be you. i am trying to be one as well

Photobox

I wanted to combine the visual and olfactorial experience of Khinalig in one mini installation. For that, I used the artworks of a photographer I hired during the second field trip as well as some archival pictures from the village. I did not want to show the photos in a straightforward way, so instead I built a box in which a viewer can fit their eyes and nose and see the pictures and smell some plants I brought from Khinalig.

Publications in Space

My project has five publications, I needed to find some way to show them in space and highlight their individualities. The Village publication was displayed on a Rahle, a special bookstand traditionally used to read the Quran. The Language publication was hidden under a pillow with a “Pillow of Language” embroidery on a pillowcase, an allegory to the students’ superstition telling them to put a book under the pillow to memorise it before the exam. An archaeological book was presented in a box among some archaeological curiosities. The researcher’s diary was put inside of a trunk of the tree, a raw material that had a crack exactly the size of the publication. The master thesis book was laid up on an industrial shelf, hinting at its more refined content.

Tooth

I wanted to include one object that would represent my love for cabinets of curiosities. During my first field trip, I was invited to participate in the archaeological excavation. The work was going very slow so by the time I needed to leave we only discovered a couple of beads and an incisor tooth. The crew members gifted me these findings and I decided to follow an impulse and solder them on a small metal plate. I exhibited it on a big wall with a spotlight on top of the plate to emphasise the importance of this piece and the intuitive approach in my work in general.

pic1 what was discovered
pic2 the tooth installation

What was discovered

In installation

Cabinet

This piece was what I initially imagined to be my whole installation. The cabinet is built from clay and mud and displays some findings from the village, artefacts representing it among some old photos. To draw parallels with the way museums work in Khinalig, this piece is only activated when the exhibition tour guide tells more details about it.

Horn and a family tree scribble scan

At the beginning of the project together with my dad, we were trying to reconstruct our family history in Khinalig. My dad would only remember his grandfather’s name and some other odd name, that he was told in childhood. We decided to try our luck in the Baku city archive and research the Russian Empire censuses from the 19th century. These censuses were used to count, and, in case of war, draft the male population. Using these censuses we have been able to recreate our family tree up to eight generations.

At the same time, during my visit to the village, I got to know some of my distant relatives, who have been also researching the family tree and sent us a scribble of the research, that I exhibited later on.

Khinalig people use a skull or horn of a mountain goat in front of their house to protect themselves from the evil eye. I carved the names of my ancestors on one of the horns. The horn has eight annuli rings (that means the goat was eight years old) exactly matching the eight known generations of my family.

Gravestone frottages

So far we have not discovered many evidences of written Khinalig language that date earlier than the 20th century. Before globalisation processes, writing was only used by scholars who learned the Quran, and the only inscriptions we could find are in Arabic script, including the tombstones in the cemetery. Inspired by the traditional Chinese technique of 榻本 my collaborators and I have made frottages of the gravestones in the village.

Website

The website was shown on a big screen with a carpet underneath so people could sit down and have enough time to check the archaeological findings and stories about them.

Design collaborations outcomes

I have invited some friends to create a postcard or a stamp that will be used in the official Khinalig post office and provided them with some visual references. Some friends painted postcards, some designed them. One friend made a website that would use Google Street View panoramas of Khinalig to generate a postcard.

Another friend has made a draft for a poster with Khinalig ABCs for kids.

Collaboration is an important project due to two reasons:

1. It is impossible for one person to do everything alone
2. It is important to prevent the hegemony of one style. The urbanistic projects that are creating a cultural code of the city where everything follows a design code are contributing to the commodification of the village and heritage.

In the future, I plan to make more collaborative initiatives and find funding for them.

Performative aspects

For me, a solo exhibition is a space to interact, as opposed to a standard setup, when people come to perceive the existing completed work. My project is many-faceted and is a result of multiple collaborations, so I find it logical to introduce it through a dialogue rather than a monologue, as well as leave many things unspoken.

Discussion

After my introduction to the project, I invited two key collaborators to discuss topics that they found important to mention. Mikhail Lylov talked about using reclaiming improvisational and exploratory research processes that are perceived as non-academic (such as Inchiesta sociale or Kraevedenie), later on, he linked them to the project.

Dunya Savilova talked about the art world being contained, detached from reality and unable to provoke pure emotion in a viewer. I have attached her text below.

I mostly talked about the collaborative aspect of Homecoming and about almost sixty people who made it possible. Unable to believe that the work had finally been concluded, I teared up almost after the first words.

Exhibition tour

The exhibition setup was based on the way the museum works in Khinalig. My text about the museum:

Museum: an assembly of significant things, a tapestry of cultures, collaged by a hesitant curator who puts a golden horn next to an embroidered crown in front of a marble tomb. Visual contexts evaporate leaving only a dry exegesis, providing a reasonable meaning to lonely, kidnapped things.

Mwazulu Diyabanza, among other pan-African activists, is taking the artefacts that belong to his ancestors and culture from the museum and bringing them back to his homeland. In the interview he says: “When the Europeans arrived, the first bases they broke were cultural bases, now with this action, we try to restore them.” This act of decolonisation left a big impression on me and made me think about ways the museums are or can be made.

Khinalig, the village on the mountain was too isolated and remote for archaeologists and museologists so the first excavations started only around 2010. Nowadays there are three museums: one governmental and two initiated by the residents. The villagers are curating these museums by themselves, and so far there is little to no interference from the side of the government. It is not a white cube, you can touch and use some objects, there are unwritten stories that are told about the things exhibited, the museum, the future of the village, and archaeological excavations.

Home museum is especially precious: it is located in the living room of a hunter who has collected things in the mountains by himself throughout decades. You come into the living room, eat, drink tea, listen to him and look at the objects, take them in your hands and rotate them, feel their history not in an alienated manner but here, right in front of you, close to the place they were found at.

To oppose the soulless white cube + description setup, I have made the exhibition with a plan that only the contribution of a storyteller/knowledge holder/guide will activate some parts of it. The storyteller is unreliable, and is not neutral, with each iteration their story change. The reliability, and source identification a key components of the Western knowledge system, the system that loots artefacts from their origin places and puts them under the glass. I do not want heritage to get classified, examined and neutralised. Hence the storyteller prevails.

Music

To bring an element of festivity to this exhibition, I asked DJ friends to play some tunes after the end of the discussion. Before the DJ sets we would need to research and find some Azerbaijani tracks that would resonate with the project, many things were sourced by asking my parents for recommendations.

The unspoken

There were things that I did not mention such as: why do I do this project? What is the context of this project in my self-exploration, what is the position of Khinalig in Azerbaijan? Will this project ever get its recognition? Will I be able to do such an ambitious, high-volume non-profit project? How to fund such projects? How to initiate them? How to find the people who helped with the research?

One day when I become a person who has the power and resources to change things fundamentally, not just as a solo activist, I will bring these questions back. For now, they are in the unspoken category.

Related works

Slavs and Tatars, Kidnapping Mountains, 2009 [https://slavsandtatars.com/printed-matter/books/kidnapping-mountains]
‘We want our riches back’ – the African activist taking treasures from Europe’s museums https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/feb/07/mwariches-african-activist-stealing-europes-museums
Taus Makhacheva Ясалъул яс (Yasalul yas – Avar for “The Daughter of the Daughter of”), 2024, video, 57 min. 03 sec.
Raf Fellner & Tegen Williams: Blue Train Lines music video
https://youtu.be/J1kzMFnFSh0
Evgeny Antufiev https://emalin.co.uk/artists/evgeny-antufiev

Thank you:
The list of these thank yous is not ordered.

1. Dunya Savilova
2. Farhad Musaev, my dad
3. Payam Sharifi
4. Mujgan Abdulzade
5. In the Mountains festival team
6. Adelina Shaydullina and Type.Today platform
7. Farhad Farzali
8. Tural Əlisoy
9. Izzət Bağırov
10. Prof. Mona Shieren
11. Nika Lakrba
12. Liza Malyan
13. Dennis Hoffmann
14. Sasha Voronina
15. Qianxun Chen
16. Ilya Sheynin
17. Hsun Hsiang Hsu
18. Jimmy Dao Sheng Liu
19. farzadgo + gabb + ap0teke
20. Daniel Vadasz + Milton Raggi
21. Vlada Arzamastseva
22. Tim Best
23. Prof. Andrea Rauschenbusch
24. Ute Fischer
25. Simon Wohlgemuth
26. Lukas + Niko from wood workshop
27. Lotta Stöver
28. Stan de Natris
29. Dezernat 4 + Bruno
30. Lasse Giesmann
31. Olesya Voronina
32. Gregor Schreiter
33. Tim Schöning
34. Helge Stobrawe
35. Prof. Dennis P Paul
36. Prof. Petra Klusmeyer
37. Sangbong Lee
38. Recep Özyilmaz
39. Daria Khoroshikh
40. Oliver Matzner
41. Stasya Eremina
42. Yusif
43. Həsən Ağayev
44. Gunay Ramazanova
45. Artists As Independent Publishers Course
46. Zane Zlemeša
47. Brigitte Stadler
48. Julia Vollmer
49. Workers of Khinalig-Baku Archives
50. Elburuz Fidan
51. Iz Öztat
52. CTM Research Networking Day Team
53. Stas Shärifullá (HMOT)
54. Liza Mukhina
55. Lali Bunyatova
56. Yunis
57. Director of Khinalig Club