On my thirtieth birthday, on a journey born from a physical impulse, in the middle of an isolated wheat field, I suddenly felt a sense of closeness I could not put into words. It appeared through the air, through the light, through the mountains of the East.

I moved between the capital, Yerevan, and rural villages, between developing urban streets and quiet mountainous landscapes. I met people living in different relationships with land and time: farmers, tech workers, university students, boarding school girls, young women navigating between tradition and new possibilities. Through glances, gestures, and everyday situations, I attempted to construct a map of human encounters - a personal portrait of Armenia as it revealed itself to me for the first time.

During my stay, I encountered women with the most generous hearts I had known. A generosity that felt almost unimaginable, deep hospitality, open gazes. Yet alongside this openness, I discovered a complex reality. Many of them live within boundaries they did not choose - social, familial, and sometimes legal boundaries. Some cannot leave their parents’ home before marriage, cannot maintain romantic relationships openly, and certainly cannot live openly outside the closet. The tension between human richness and the narrowing of possibilities was present in almost every conversation.

On the final day of the journey, I sat in a small café. I asked one of the waitresses, who had caught my attention, if I could photograph her. We stepped briefly into a side alley, and she agreed to be photographed, cigarette in hand, between shifts. Without the camera, the encounter would not have taken place. When I photograph, I am not afraid; the camera opens a possibility for trust, for purpose, and for a sense of security.

The woman spoke to me about the difficulty of living with a weak passport and limited opportunities. We spoke about other countries, about places that might offer greater freedom. Instinctively, I suggested neighboring Iran - a suggestion that sounded almost absurd to both of us, and she laughed. She and her partner live in the closet. Even imagining another life already felt complex.

The journey led me to reconsider the idea of entrapment - the feeling of being confined within historical, political, or familial circumstances, and the fear of a life that might pass emptily. Sometimes it seems that our lives are predetermined by conditions beyond our control. Yet looking outward always reveals further complexities. Everywhere there are possibilities we do not know, limitations we do not see, and freedoms that are far from self-evident.

The work on this series emerged from an attempt to understand how personal history meets a broader social reality. Armenia became, for me, not only a geographical place but a field of thought - a space in which questions take form through human encounters.

Perhaps we are never entirely free from the circumstances into which we are born. Yet even while submerged in the ocean of constraints imposed upon us, the encounter with others allows us to recognize how boundaries are often also a product of perspective. Just as I believed I was traveling to a distant place in order to understand something about a familial past, I discovered that the story does not belong only to the past. It continues to unfold through fleeting connections, through exchanged glances, through the possibility of seeing another life - and perhaps also my own - as slightly more open than it first appears.