In a town in the interior of Armenia where men migrate part of the year to work in construction and the fields in Russia and women await their arrival, with their in-laws at home, there lives a young woman who takes several pills daily, without asking questions. . She doesn't know what they are for. She gives them to her from her mother-in-law. She swallows them with a little water. Later she will discover the reason: she is an HIV carrier. Her husband passed it on to her.
It is one of the stories portrayed in the photo essay Red, Black, White (Red, Black, White) by Armenian photographer Nazik Armenakyan, who has spent more than four years traveling through rural Armenia to hear the stories of women diagnosed with HIV. Her work was exhibited in December at the Giotto museum in Yerevan. “I felt a very strong sense of injustice when I learned that there are women who only find out that they are HIV positive when they become pregnant and go to the hospital,” exclaims the photographer, in a videoconference interview. “How can this happen in the 21st century?” she adds.
Neither the war in Ukraine nor the sanctions to Russia have stopped what for some is the only way to advance their family in Armenia. According to data from the country's Government, at least some 80,000 Armenians travel to Russia annually to carry out temporary jobs. Their remittances represent a 5% of Armenia's GDP.
The magnitude of this migration of seasonal workers is such that there are entire towns that are emptied of men part of the year, Armenakyan maintains. As he explains, in some rural regions of the interior of Armenia, a former Soviet republic, traditionally going to work in Russia has been the only way to support the family. But once there, some have risky sex, become infected with HIV, and when they return home, they transmit it to their wives.
“It's a drama,” says Armenakyan. In 2012, 62% of the 228 people who had become infected with HIV in Armenia did so abroad (141 cases), according to a study, published in 2016, in the Journal of the International AIDS Society, and 126 of those cases took place in Russia (89.4%). 20% of the partners of these migrant workers were also infected (45 cases).
This is a vicious circle, which is compounded by the lack of information and vulnerability of these workers. A 2019 report on tuberculosis and HIV among migrants from Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, conducted by the United Nations International Organization for Migration, found that stigma was one of the barriers to non-testing. “Also the fear of deportation,” cites the UN study. Russia is one of the 18 countries in the world that deport to HIV-positive foreigners.
The number of HIV-positive Armenians, a total of 4,356 people According to the latest data, it is small, but growing. In less than a year – between January and October 31, 2023 – 500 new cases of HIV have been documented in Armenia, of which 30% are women. Among men, the majority are between 25 and 39 years old. This increase in HIV in Armenia has become a trend in the region. Eastern Europe and Central Asia are the areas of the world with the fastest growing HIV epidemic, according to the UNAIDS annual report 2022, according to which, there are currently about 39 million people carrying the virus in the world. 46% of all new HIV infections worldwide occurred among women and girls in 2022. In Russia, there are more than a million of people with HIV.
A silent epidemic among women
Armenakyan explains that he discovered the issue by chance, in 2014, talking with a friend and, for a long time, he was thinking about how to make the problem visible without exposing the survivors. “I couldn't show her face so that those around her wouldn't recognize them, but we had to talk about it,” she says.
Contact with Real World, Real People, an Armenian NGO founded by a group of doctors and people with HIV in 2003. There he received documentation and statistics. “And, when they saw that she was someone who was really interested, they introduced me to some women with HIV,” she explains. “In Armenia, there were still many prejudices regarding HIV, due to the images we had seen in the nineties,” continues the photographer. “But these were normal, ordinary Armenian women,” she adds. Some had only had that partner; They had married early; They had gone to live with their in-laws and took care of their children.
Initially, the photographer visited the towns where there were the most cases and tried various ideas to address the phenomenon, “even blurred portraits,” she explains. She drove on highways and dirt roads. She listened to the stories and sometimes she cried with them, but there came a time when she had to stop. “First, because she didn't really understand the topic and second, she didn't know how to tell it.” It was 2016.
However, in 2019, he returned to the project with a very different approach. The result was a photographic series with 10 portraits and several still lifes. Nothing that appears is coincidental, not even the red apples, a fruit that in Armenia symbolizes the virginity of the bride and is usually given by families on their wedding day. Or a red table, “which seems like something very basic, but it is an object that exists in the daily life of every Armenian woman and on which they do many things,” explains Nazik. “But it is also a table of sacrifice,” she adds, because many women, upon learning that they are HIV carriers, think that they have no other options and even if they suffer violence, they do not leave. Because this, according to Armenakyan, is a story with many layers: the lack of education and prevention, of opportunities, the taboo around women's sexuality, shame, sexist violence.
When Armenakyan's work was exhibited in Yerevan in December, many students came. The photographer appreciated that the young people asked many questions. “When the time comes, they will remember these images and maybe they will change things a little, because if an image is capable of moving you, you will live with it, that is the capacity that photography and art have,” she concludes.
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