These are the verses that inspired the last painting of Assyrian artist Javad Mirjavadov (1923-1992). His wife, the painter and poet Luvob Mirjavadova, showed me the painting in her house in Baku, Azerbaijan, in April of 2007. I was traveling there with a group of artists, art teachers and students taking part in a research project organized by the art school, Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. The trip to Azerbaijan and Armenia was the colophon of a series of conferences and research seminars held at the school by artists and scholars from Caucasus or specialists on those countries. The aim of our trip was to make contact with art institutions and artists of the region and, eventually, to establish links between them and Dutch or European art organizations for future projects.

I was brought to Luba's house by a young and brilliant photographer, Rena Effendi, of whose work I will talk later. Luvob Mirjavadova lives in one of the old parts of Baku, on the top of a hill, where tracks of Soviet occupation are still visible in the kind of architecture. This part of the city is composed of small and beautiful streets, which time has rendered dirty and broken. Some of the houses are partially or completely collapsed, and the ruins of some of them remain still in the streets, as dead elephants, waiting to be replaced by the monstrous skyscrapers that are forming the new landscape of the Baku.

Luba receives us very warmly. She is more than sixty years old but she is full of energy when she talks and moves. Her clothes are marked with paint; she has been working before our visit. Her house is her studio; or her studio is her house. We come in; the space is full of canvases, everywhere, and poems, written in Cyrillic, filling the little free spaces: on small pieces of walls, on the doors, on the furniture… My impression is that of having entered, literally, in a live work of art, a labyrinth of words and colors.