Help Us Create a Permanent Home for an Eco Art Workshop in Rural Armenia

Hi! We are Abastan – a small independent art and community initiative based in the mountain town of Tumanyan in northern Armenia.

Since 2022, we have been creating a unique environment where artists, musicians, craftspeople, researchers, and many others can meet, work together, support one another, and share knowledge. Our community brings together people from different countries and backgrounds, many of whom found themselves rebuilding their lives far from home. At the same time, we are deeply committed to supporting and contributing to the small town that gradually became home away from home for many of us.

Over the past few years, we have organized a wide range of artistic, educational, and social initiatives. One of the most important among them became a small eco-workshop dedicated to transforming plastic waste into design objects, artworks, and versatile material for creative work.

The workshop was built literally by hand by members of the community Sasha Korolyova and Andrey Strizhkov inside a small village house. They assembled DIY machines on-site from locally available components, experimented with recycling different types of plastic and gradually turned the space into an open workshop where visitors can not only learn about recycling, but also experience making things themselves and working directly with materials by hand.

In Armenia, plastic bags are everywhere: caught in trees, scattered along roadsides, carried into rivers and mountain creeks by the wind. They are cheap, lightweight, and used constantly, which often makes their environmental impact feel invisible. One of the goals of our workshop is to draw attention to this problem and show that even “waste” can have value and potential and that ephemeral bags can be turned into durable material.

But of course this project is about more than recycling.

We want to create a place where people can experience making something themselves and where creativity is connected to responsibility for the environment and the places we live in. We also want to show that meaningful projects do not require huge investments or large institutions and that art and creativity can thrive in small rural towns like Tumanyan.

Today, the workshop regularly organizes educational workshops and participates in exhibitions, eco-events, and festivals. More and more people are discovering the space and becoming involved.

Using recycled plastic bags, film, bottle caps, and other discarded materials, the workshop creates both rigid and flexible sheet materials that are then transformed into bags, wallets, document covers, decorative objects, artworks, and custom-designed pieces.

The workshop also collaborates with guest artists, providing space and support for them to experiment with recycled materials and realize their own creative projects.

Animation puppet by artist Torfeh Ehlasi (2025)

Upcycled chair, by Nino Chechelashvili (2024)

However, our recycling workshop faces a serious problem: it does not have a permanent home.

Over the past years, it had to move multiple times because of unstable rental conditions. Each move meant rebuilding the workshop again from scratch, repairing new spaces, transporting equipment, and losing precious time and energy that could otherwise go into developing the project itself.

That is why we are now fundraising to purchase a village house that can become a stable long-term home for the workshop and the community around it.

Having a permanent space would allow us to:

Our overall fundraising goal across different platforms is €10,000. On GoFundMe, we are currently hoping to raise €4,000 toward purchasing and preparing the future workshop house.

Every contribution, no matter the size, helps us continue building this independent, environmentally conscious, and community-facing art space in rural Armenia.

Thank you for supporting our project!

Polina Ivanova is a scholar at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and one of the founders of Abastan NGO. She lived in Armenia for several years and now lives between Austria and Germany. She frequently returns to Armenia for research and volunteer work.