In 2021, at the summit of Mount Aragats, an extinct volcano in Armenia, an unexplained luminous phenomenon is observed by scientists working at a space observation station. For exactly ten minutes, luminous spots appear and disappear in deep space. The project imagines a fictional story built around this phenomenon. What if this signal had actually been the reason the Aragats observation station was built, with the purpose of communicating with another form of existence?
During the Soviet era, Mount Aragats, Ara-gah, “the throne of Ara,” became one of the major centers of astronomy. Its observatories played an important role in astronomical research and in the development of the space race during the Cold War.
Major discoveries were made on Aragats: scientists observed that stars are born in groups and identified thousands of galaxies, including the Markarian galaxies. This research placed Armenia on the world scientific map for the first time. The mountain also became home to one of the most ambitious radio telescope projects, designed to detect extremely weak signals from deep space and contribute to deep space communication programs.
In the 1980s, more than 800 scientists worked on Aragats, all of them looking towards the sky. Then came the collapse of the Soviet Union, wars and mass emigration. The stations emptied, and the surrounding villages were gradually deserted. Today, the mountain seems almost abandoned. Yet a few scientists continue to maintain activity there, refusing to let these places disappear completely.
