The archaeological record is birthed in what Alfredo González-Ruibal calls a twilight zone—a time between life and death, between use and abandonment, when despair and optimism jockey for position in the lives of those caught up in ruination. In this talk, I share new research on the twilight zone of Soviet industry in the Republic of Armenia, where decommissioned and ruined factories occupy a liminal state between the systemic and the archaeological context. While the recent ‘turn to ruins’ in archaeology, anthropology, and cultural geography offers compelling critiques of capitalism and modernity, as well as new approaches to materiality and affect, it does not fully account for what happens in the twilight zone. In post-Soviet Armenia, this is a time marked by struggles to unlock or forgo the ‘salvage value’ of Soviet machines and factories undergoing slow, irreversible decay. These struggles enlist people into acts of constant extemporization, doing things one never planned or was trained to do. Here I focus on the improvisational practices of extemporists in different Armenian cities, and their efforts to revalue the anachronistic but persistent material world of Soviet industry. These are strenuous projects at the margins of global capitalism to retain industrial lifeways and make a living under conditions of ruination.

      Lori Khatchadourian is Associate Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University. With a PhD in Classical Art & Archaeology from the University of Michigan (2008) and an MSc in Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics from the London School of Economics (1998), Lori’s research traverses the ancient and modern to grapple with the relationship between imperialism and materiality. The focus of her archaeological and ethnographic research is the ancient and post-Soviet Caucasus, building on an earlier career in international political development in post-socialist Eurasia. She is author of Imperial Matter: Ancient Persia and the Archaeology of Empires (2016), co-editor of Fitful Histories and Unruly Publics: Rethinking Temporality and Community in Eurasian Archaeology (2017, with Kathryn Weber, Emma Hite and Adam Smith), and author of numerous articles on the archaeology of the Caucasus, Anatolia, and Persia. Turning now to the contemporary era, Lori’s current book project is a multidisciplinary study of the ruins of modernity in the Caucasus.