Astrig Agopian

Following the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020, the blockade, and the mass displacement of over 100,000 Armenians in 2023, the region’s history is under immediate threat of being forgotten. With physical access heavily restricted, dominant political narratives often overshadow the true human cost of this recent tragedy.

In response, journalist and filmmaker Astrig Agopian founded Like There’s No Tomorrow in 2022. Moving away from extractive news cycles toward collaborative, ethically grounded artistic practices, Agopian’s multimedia initiative builds a lasting, independent archive of personal testimonies and tangible losses. Her collaborative approach combines photography, video, text, and audio, recording endangered regional dialects, documenting meaningful personal objects brought by survivors, and supplying disposable cameras to village children to capture their daily lives. As their cultural heritage faces physical destruction, the project also incorporates Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) techniques to digitally map and safeguard these vanishing landscapes.

Through recognition and representation, Like There’s No Tomorrow creates the space for collective witnessing, moving beyond anonymous conflict statistics to “put faces on the numbers,” and creating the space for truth-telling and remembrance when formal accountability is absent.