An Intercultural Dialogue in Georgia, May 13th -28th, 2007, Tbilisi & Batumi 

This project was made possible by financial support from the Education, Youth, and Culture Council (EYC) of the European Union. Its activities included:

1 a photo exhibition at the Tbilisi Academy of the Arts

2 the grand opening of a graffiti wall in the Park of the Roses

3 modern dance performances by lift.dvizhenie and local actors at the Svobodny Theatre

4 video presentations at the New Art Gallery by David Chikhladze and lift.dvizhenie 

A Traveler-Participant’s Commentary: “Holy Georginas” or “From Russia to Georgia for Modern Art”

Gruziya, grust, gruz, gruzit, grubyi, grustit – grumbling, grunting, grieving, grief… This is how the word, Gruziya, used to unfold itself in my head. Then there came the mass of cultural and political associations, until I almost lost track of the sounds. But still, the words and images seemed to run together so neatly: grust, grief, gruz…  

We arrived in Tbilisi in May for our ‘intercultural dialogue’ on modern art. The project brought Dutch and Romanian photographers, Polish graffiti artists, and Russian dancers together with their Georgian counterparts in Tbilisi for an interesting fusion of performances, creative labs, and idea exchanges. The graffitists had it the hardest. It took them a month to find a wall to work with, and then they had to wait for their paints to be delivered from Poland, since there were amazingly none to be had anywhere in Georgia. Perhaps the population had taken preemptive measures against a graffiti invasion.

The actors with whom we had the pleasure of working could be discouraging at times. Though we were in fact all the same age, occasionally it seemed that they were so much younger than we were, naive and sweet and not completely grown-up. Their infantilism and almost poetic spirituality seemed so strange in our modern world, and we secretly took to calling them the “Holy Georginas.” 

And what they did - well, it was not theatre, really, but theatre cubed. Or at least squared. They produced a river of wordplay, pathos, and exalted gestures that had a very physical effect on us, and at times we had trouble struggling against the fierce, expressive simplicity of our colleagues in dance, who somehow managed to be both threatening and delightful all at once. We truly were lost – and so we began to look for guide posts outside the cultural archetypes of our own Russian soul. This is how I eventually decided to perform my solo in a nabadi – the traditional garb of this proud mountain people. The wide nabadi flapped around my body, transforming into wings. When the Georgians would say this word, “nabadi,” I kept hearing the English word, “nobody,” and remembering Sasha Waltz – and the spirit of her performance seemed to take on flesh there in Georgia. 

Our immersion began to take on a freer form as we slowly became absorbed with bits of Tbilisi life. The little homes seemed to be growing out chaotically out from the mountainsides, making wild efforts to overtake their neighbors. Sometimes it reached the point where a low and trembling balcony was so bent and bowed that it was practically touching the street – but this still managed to look more like a kiss than a traffic hazard.

Actually, everything and everyone seemed closer together. Italian courtyards opened themselves to our curious eyes: unable to help ourselves, we just had to peek, and each and every time we saw not just the neighbors but rather a mob of lovers, eagerly annoying one another. The courtyards and streets felt like an Eastern space, somehow: drying underwear hung everywhere, shamelessly on display. You could not but think well of the owners.

The openness and forwardness of it all created a very strong desire to go home and make something (not fix something or remodel something, not clean or straighten – actually make something) and even the clothes (and the jewelry, and the accessories – the like of which I had never seen before I set foot in Georgia) seem to envelop us in creativity and art. A house begins to settle and slouch to one side – the residents quickly give it a crutch, propping it up with a wooden pole. They also make very surprising little ornaments from sheep skin – the tekku, though they perhaps make far more in word than in deed. Their attitude toward work is, of course, interesting. They say that there’s no work now – you wonder, was there ever? Very few seem busy with anything serious. We also learned that, as a result of the civil war in the 90s, a whole generation of young people has grown up there practically unable to read or to work, not possessing any real sense of time or its value.  

We gave our performance at the Svobodny Theatre, but we never stopped wanting to go back to the city and dance in the street among the people, who would actually sit and watch us like an audience. We never got used to that. Sitting all day on a miniature chair on the curb! To sit there like that, forgetting about time and rarely shifting your pose… I was truly struck by this living installation - the living watching life pass by.

Tbilisi is cinematic. You don’t need to go looking for a movie theater here - you just stand still and a surrealistic scene forms right there around you, something that you couldn’t have imagined in any fantasy. The city is absolutely filled with abandoned churches, and the churches are filled – literally, filled - with abandoned books. You go into the ancient temples to look at the old tomes written in different languages, lying there and beginning to smell. You know that nobody can be reading them. How did they ever come here? And then again outside the gates there’s yet another wonder waiting for you, which you won’t ever be able to explain either… 

At the same time, it’s almost impossible to pull off an innocuous little art activity in that city. Having organized a performance in our favorite genre – the promenade – we seemed to encounter people at every step who told us don’t do that, don’t go there, don’t touch this, and then, after we explained to them at length that it really was only for art – nothing political, not a demonstration – they looked at one another for a long time and said, “yeah, okay.” Then off they went, looking for other things to be judgmental about. In the end we tried to create a mental map of our project, such as the American urban planner, Kevin Lynch, might have done. In the end we chose the central square of the city for our work - but not out of self importance! It’s just one of the rare spots in Tbilisi that is covered properly in asphalt – which we needed for our chalk drawings. 

The sites of the city began to appear, childlike and wonderful – and just then there popped up a city official. He looked over our work awhile and then called over one of his colleagues, who also seemed to struggle with a verdict before calling over a third, who called on a fourth and a fifth. Strange. They certainly saw no anti-government slogans. But what were we doing in the central square? What if our work really had nothing to do with politics, if it really was just art and people and friendships…? Politics only tries to break friendships up, by the way, by refusing you a visa or canceling all the direct flights. In the end, these city officials made a compromise. They told us to stop, but said we didn’t have to erase any of what we’d already drawn. At least that part was okay. 

It’s not really clear where the modern art is hiding in Tbilisi. On the street, though, you thankfully see more than protests and demonstration. You also see fountains. We were struck not only by their number (as they say, after all - in a city Oriental, the fountains are essential,) but by their construction: singing, dancing, spraying in hydro-technical bacchanalia. Later we got acquainted with the organizer and director of New Art, Rusiko Oat, and we learned that she is preparing a project on exactly that subject – a fountain kingdom where the rulers endlessly fill their world with fountains.

Our encounter with Rusiko was less of a mess than most of our meetings in Tbilisi. Rusiko explained how she was creating a life here in the Caucasus for modern art by cooperating with Armenian and Azerbaijani organizations, and she described for us some of the interesting projects that she had worked on with Russians in the past. Incidentally, this was the first year that Georgia had contributed its own pavilion to the Venetian Bienale. 

Rusiko also introduced us to a Georgian video artist and poet, David Chikhladze, who had only just returned from New York, where he had lived for nearly eight years, and we began to work together on a video project. And Rusiko introduced us to members of the Tbilisi Theatre Movement, who deeply loved street presentations and desperately needed foreigners to perform with, as a means of resisting the disapproval of the conservative local public. Rusiko also introduced us to the editorial staff of Otpechatok. When you leaf through this local magazine, you see in its pages such a lush, full world of culture and creative life that it seems impossible it wasn’t actually published in Berlin. But you don’t find that in city. We ask the young people working on the magazine why this is, and they tell us that it’s nothing strange or surprising – they always have to do the art here themselves.

And that’s probably a good note to end on, in Magical Gruziya, full of its implausible phantoms. This country always seems to live under somebody’s watchful eye – it flirts and complains, and eventually somebody gives in. Next year we’re thinking of going back to Georgia with a new project, and again we will be perplexed, gladdened, and thrilled… among the Holy Georginas.