Georgia Artists in Residence, GeoAIR

In 2005 the Georgian artist Sophia Tabatadze and I founded GeoAIR. GeoAIR organizes and supports international exchange projects with the goal of strengthening the Georgian and Caucasian art world, bringing together artists from different cultural backgrounds and finding relevant contexts for them to work in. Besides this, GeoAIR raises awareness and stimulates engagement with art and culture from this region. The foundation works together with international individuals and organizations that share it’s goals. GeoAIR has also become, over the last 2 years, an intermediary for individuals and organizations that seek connection with the arts in the republic of Georgia and the region of the Caucasus.

Notes from Georgia autumn 2006. #1.

This autumn, from half October till half November, I am staying in Tbilisi with my friend and project partner Sophia Tabatadze. We are working on setting up an NGO in Tbilisi, with the purpose of stimulating international exchange between people from the fields of art and design. Last year around this time I was here to see Georgia for the first time, but during my 9 days stay I felt I was just flying over. This second time, I am here for 3 weeks, which makes it possible to go a little deeper into trying to understand Georgia’s contemporary society and how it relates to it’s history. Still, I feel I am only gathering pieces of a puzzle and I have no idea yet how to put them together. My notes from Georgia autumn 2006 is a collection of phenomena, that I feel are part of the Georgian reality, and which I’ve found in writings, conversations and in observations.

Like the first time, I entered Georgia with the bus from Istanbul, after 4 hours of waiting in lines at the border, I got of in Batumi in the late evening. The rain from Istanbul had guided us all the way to Batumi, and the city at night gave me the exact same gloomy feeling as last year. I jumped into a cab and told the driver to take me to some hotels I had read about. The first three on my list were beyond shabby and he suggested to show me a few he knew. These were the opposite of shabby (kitsch) with their style somewhere between a hotel and a discotheque or brothel. On the way he made a spontaneous d-tour, showing me the palmed boulevard and ‘chique’ hotels and houses on the seaside. I saw Batumi has flair and money, being the number 1 beach town in Georgia.
The last hotel on my list was okay, off course they asked the double price and with the bargaining I learned in Brazil I got the price down to what it should be. The lady owner and her male employee, both somewhere in their 50s, were friendly and offered me some tea. I sat down with them and watched a Russian tv documentary about ‘the great bridges in the world’, while they were eating sausages, bread and drinking beers and vodka that they apparently had been doing for some hours already. After my tea I went up to my room that I could not lock because the man had given me the wrong key, and noticed there was no toilet paper. At first he did not believe me when I told him the key was not working, so he tried it for a while pushing the key upside-down against the lock. He gave up and got me another key and some toilet paper. The room looked nice but somehow nothing made sense. The headboard of the bed was covering the outlets, the couch was so close to the bed you could not sit on it comfortably, and everything was broken or missing parts. It was sad and funny at the same time. I did sleep for 6 full hours and woke up at 7 to take the train to Tbilisi.
There could not have been a bigger difference between last night and this morning in Batumi. The bright blue sky and the sharp morning sun gave the streets a fresh appearance, and in this part of town the late 19th and early 20th century 3 story buildings and little shops, gave the place a feeling like a midsize town in France on a Sunday morning. I felt as if Georgia was welcoming me and we were given another chance together, since the first time I had experienced my stay in such a haze. I took my first Machutka, private owned minivans serving as public transport, and got to the recently opened train station in time for two strong and sweet Turkish coffees at the buffet. I sat down at the only table, that I  shared it with a man drinking a beer and smoking one Gauloise after the other. He was a truck driver, and had seen most of Europe. I asked him if he was also driving in Russia. He said that that had been a no go area for him for a long time now. He hated Russia and the current situation created an even bigger distance between the two countries.
When you are from Holland most conversations start with the link to Sandra Roelofs, the presidents wife, and then lead to the president Saakarishvili. The truck driver said he preferred Shevarnadze, who he found to be politically smarter and less of a playboy.
I wondered why this white modern buffet only had one table and observed the black dressed old widow lady as she was serving us and moving around. It looked like she was cut out from another era and animated into the scenery. Or was it the other way round, where the setting was a futuristic décor with us moving around in it. We asked her why the buffet only had one table and she told us that above us was the actual public space for tables and chairs but this was not ready yet. I heard the train coming and got up to pay but the truck driver would not allow me and paid my two coffees. Apparently sharing a table with a Georgian as a foreigner means that you can never pay. The Georgians are the hosts to their whole country, not only of their own house, and their hospitality is a matter of the hosts honour.
I found a window seat and felt completely satisfied with this chance to see Georgia at train speed and sit in these comfortable soft old chairs wondering about what I knew about this country and what I was going to work on the coming weeks. The stunning image of Caucasus mountains, on the north border, stood calm and majestic while the train was moving west to east. One moment they looked like fierce sharp teeth never to be crossed, and the next they turned into a beautiful white crown or a lace edge bordering the green valleys in the heartland of Georgia. I saw, what some call the highest mountain of Europe; the Elbroes, and I thought ‘What is Europe?’, where does it begin and where does it end? Where are it’s borders? As I was closing in on Tbilisi, I came to the conclusion that the idea of what is Europe, is bigger than the set of countries it officially entails. I imagined the European border shifting over the world map from place to place taking different positions along with different geographical interpretations and explanations. Geography is everything but an exact science, it is more like storytelling based of cultural and political values. Which is why thinking of the border of Europe, while being in Georgia interests me. It can give me information about the past, and the present of the real and imaginary relations between the Georgian and other cultures. To be continued………..

Notes from Georgia, autumn 2006. #2.

Discovering the Georgian philosopher Merab Mamardashvili.

One day I was walking the streets of one of the oldest neighbourhoods of Tbilisi the Maidan where east and west meet and Muslims, Jews, Sun worshippers and Christians are living side by side. Armenians, Georgians, Kurds, Russians, Azerbaijanis, and Jews speak each others languages. The neighbourhood reflects the Georgian and Caucasian history, of the constant shifting of borders and migration of people, in a region with possibly the biggest diversity of different cultures in the world.
I went into a bookstore that seemed to be specialised in Georgian and Russian literature and books promoting the beauty of Georgia. Here I found some pale postcards of an empty boulevard in Batumi, and I came across in the new P. S. Culture paper which, as I red, has the intention ‘to introduce to the public the Post Soviet way of art, literature and culture…….as a way to trace the formation of current trends in the arts’.

The paper is a product of the publishing house ‘the Siesta group’. Besides articles about poetry, literature and art from past and present times there was an article with ‘extracts from conversations with Merab Mamerdashvili, a great Georgian philosopher’. In this article Mamerdashvili says a few things that for me make part of the Georgian puzzle.
Mamerdashvili started teaching philosophy at the Moscow university, where his lectures always ended up being terminated toward the end of the semesters, still giving him the opportunity to share his thoughts with the audience. Lecturing became increasingly difficult, as for all intellectuals, but through a network of friends and the cracks in the maze of bureaucracy he managed to stay in touch with his audience.

Mamerdashvili;
“In school they taught me nothing …. the ideology of Marxism-Leninism can only be known as far as speech and not be learned because the human brain has nothing in common with that ideology. … it is impossible to learn it by thinking or by reason because the words have no meaning at all. …. by the degree of 1918 they eliminated all the literature from the libraries that was religious or philosophical. …… In 1949, when I moved to Moscow … human relationships were very intensive because most people had gone through war. They had received the experience of initiative, of risk and standing face to face with death. … all former captives were exiled in the Soviet Concentration camps. …. It was necessary to hamper the waking up of people that had gone through the war. Those who had seen Europe and it’s different life, had to be held back not to express their own opinion.

I pose the question: is it feasible, a speech which could exclude the possibility of thinking and of a philosophical problem? In the Soviet Union the answer was positive. It exists as far as the systematic ideology focuses on being effective and not on what people think about it. In the situation of endless meetings, in front of a statue, it is impossible to think. During meetings the very kind of speech excludes thinking. I have to add that this speech is impossible because man remains to be man and the sign of it is the appearing of apparitions, ghosts and bodiless creatures. I would say this is a life after death, and we have lived this life after death, we have lived apparitions, have been non existing creatures talking of non existing objects, arguing against something non-existing. Everything was unreal. But they argue nowadays too don’t they? What is the subject of their argument? This is market, money, commerce, profit.”
Mamerdashvili argues that in Georgia and the Soviet union the way people deal with money also comes close the dealing with this theory of the non-existing since in his opinion people have no notion about the original meaning of ‘money’ being a value that you have based on the work you have to do to get it and then to use this for it’s original value. Since people are extremely under paid, and to buy something one has to make much more effort than just spending your money, the notion of value connected to the original meaning of money is very distorted. He asks: “How is it possible that you have no notion of money and are still interested in it? Yes, it is a life of ghosts in the world of apparitions.
In our situation the social tissue is extremely shrunk. … it is like magma, soft, moving, just needs a push. For example the governments campaign against alcoholism. In Georgia the police stood in front of restaurants looking for drunken people…. To catch a Georgian for drinking wine? Drinking wine is an inseparable part of Georgian culture. This idiotic campaign just gets through the soft social body, it proceeded without any obstacle because there is not membrane in the social tissue. I don’t know how it can strengthen. I know it will take 100 or even 200 years. When we talk of a social structure the word that fits it is articulation, because it’s good to imagine a picture of the anatomic articulation where a hand is articulated to fulfil a movement. Movement is a complicated process. What does it take, on an anatomic level, a different articulation? A simple movement. But the articulation has to be complicated to allow what is almost a mystery. How it happens that the consciousness, that is, the desire of a movement can fulfil a movement? These very structures that I describe are on the other side of some consciousness. In fact, I spoke of a phantom consciousness which is the Soviet “culture”. Just the other side of this kind of consciousness has a social body without an articulation. Therefore, time is needed, and social articulations too.”

Notes from Georgia, autumn 2006. #3

Bus Tbilisi – Istanbul 12-11-‘06

Today Sopo and Murah brought me to the international bus station for my bus back to Istanbul. From behind my bus window I can see that winter is on it’s way. There is a fierce wind outside, and the country side is being stripped from it’s green softness that smoothens the image of Georgia in Spring and late summer. True, noting but removal can change the image of decay and ‘worn-out-ness’ in the leftovers of industry, infrastructure and houses that cover the landscape of Georgia.  In this country, things are used till they cannot be fixed anymore and no money is wasted on making sure things look good if you don’t have the money to keep things working.

It is cabbage harvest time, and the roadside of the main Georgian highway between east and west seems to be a popular place to sell the shiny light green football sized vegetables. The vendors pile them up by the hundreds or sell them from the trunk of their 1960 Lada. Dressed in as much layers as possible, they sit around little fires waiting for other salesmen to pick up a load for a market or a shop.
We are moving from the Georgian valley into a mountain area now and we pass through a city connecting the two regions. The central square is dominated by a gas station with a huge parking zone in front of it taking up 70% of the square. ‘A square’ in Georgia usually means a big open space in town where traffic has the main right of way and performs its chaotic choreography only for the pedestrian to move around the edges and use the underpasses to get to the other side. Like in many counties, in Georgian the main traffic flows right through the heart of the cities. Ring ways are a modern invention only possible if there are also other ways into town, necessary for all cities in the world who don’t want to suffocate their inhabitants to death while expanding. Georgia cannot afford ring ways and maybe they don’t even want them since seeing more cars means seeing more wealth.
I wonder if the socio psychological side of car ownership has ever been the subject of scientific research. People have so many theories about the relationship between a car and the owners behaviour. In Georgia for instance the more expensive the car the bigger the ego and a-social the behaviour of the driver. A few times it happened to us that, while we were waiting for a red light in a one lane track, a big shiny car pulled up to the right of us, moving in the lane of the traffic coming from the opposite direction, and are also waiting for a red light on the other side of the intersection. Before the light turns green he pulls up like a mad man just to get in front of you before the opposite traffic gets him into trouble. Off course you can see this behaviour in many places in the world. It just starts getting surprising, when the level of irresponsibility and egoism feels more like the norm than the exception.
Looking out of the bus window at the beautiful autumn coloured mountains with the first snow between the trunks, one feels another life in oneself. Another self than in the city. Since Brazil I feel stronger and stronger about wanting the ‘other than the city’ life. I only seem to really realise this though when I am in the countryside. When being in the city I wonder ‘it that what I really want?’, and this strong feeling somehow cannot be remembered or re-lived and moves to the background. One has to make oneself experience the well doing of ‘being outside’, like the way one has to make oneself exercise to bring oneself to that good feeling. Life is in the moment. I am used to the city and life is so tied into it that, while being there, it is hard to realise it could be better outside. When I am outside though I feel and I know that this is what I have to make my life. This is not a matter of we’ll see, this is a matter of we’ll do.
We just crossed the Georgian-Turkish border in less than 1 hour. I forgot this difference and remember now that it was the same when I made this trip the first time. I guess that the 4 hour drama from Turkey into Georgia kind of prepares you for the worst. As a little ‘make up bummer’, the bus stops 500 mtrs into Turkey to replace a wheel but waiting in the bus is not as bad as at the border in cold half-sheltered spaces, with a draft wind under football stadium light surrounded by smoking men and border control employees taking their job way too serious and being really creative in showing who’s man.
As on the way to Georgia I am lucky to have a friendly Georgian woman next to me. We don’t share a language so we communicate with universal signs. She and her two woman friends seem to have adopted me, keeping an eye on me when we are ‘aired’ and sharing all the food and snacks they are eating constantly. By now I have been offered chewing gum twice, fruit, a chocolate bar, a sweet pastry, a little bag of very salty peanuts and gatchapurri. I said no to the last and finally got them to understand that I have a bag full of food with me. I am waiting for a bus brake where I can eat my lasagna and doggy-bag salad I took from the lunch stop we made before.