Batlle’s series emerges from an inherited memory of survival: their grandfather lived through the Armenian Genocide, Meds Yeghern (Մեծ Եղեռն), “the Great Crime.” This history, carried through their mother’s stories, positions survival not as closure, but as a generational beginning that continually reshapes subjectivity.

In drawings the heart is multiplied—redrawn as a container of fear, memory, and breath. Repetition turns it into landscape, a fragile topography marked by rupture. In sculptural form, the heart becomes shelter, a precarious interior that invites the body inside.

Alongside the hearts, the hands grasp, reach, and hold on—gestures of resistance and fragility that echo the act of clinging to life amidst war. Figures of solidarity and vulnerability inscribed in flesh.

The work refuses to remain bound to the past. It insists on the persistence of violence, where the mountains of bodies that Batlle’s grandfather survived echo in the destruction of Gaza and Palestine, and in every geography where displacement and erasure are lived daily.