- Typologie
- Film
- Projekt
- Tbilisi Architecture Biennial : Sakhli Opisi - What Do We Have in Common? A film by c/o now XXX
- c/o now begleiten seit zwei Jahren die Tbilisi Architecture Biennal als deren offizieller Partner. Für die 2020er Ausgabe unter dem Titel ›What do we have in Common‹ wollten c/o now dieser Frage vor Ort auf den Grund gehen und den Versuch unternehmen, sie in einem Film zu beantworten. Dann kam die Pandemie und niemand von c/o now hat bis heute auch nur einen Fuß auf georgischen, geschweige den auf den Boden der Stadt Tbilisi gesetzt. Stattdessen begannen c/o now damit sich Tbilisi und Georgien auf ›Googlewalks‹ im Homeoffice (georg. ›Sakhli Opisi‹) zu erarbeiten und bei ihrer Annäherung die Geschichte und Geschichten Dritten zur Hilfe zu nehmen. So entstand nun ein Film, der nicht nur nach dem Gemeinsamen sucht, sondern der auch die Pandemie selbst als großes Gemeinsames, ihre Auswirkungen wie Verschiebungen in den digitalen Raum und vieles von dem, was durch die Pandemie an die Oberfläche geschwemmt wurde, thematisiert. ›Sakhli Opisi - What Do We Have in Common?‹ is co-funded by the CREATIVE EUROPE PROGRAMME of the EUROPEAN UNION This film is a contribution to the TBILISI ARCHITECTURE BIENNIAL 2020.
- team c/o now
- Andrijana Ivanda, Duy An Tran, Milena, Rutschmann, Tobias Hönig, Markus Rampl, Paul Reinhardt, Tom Steinhöfer
- musik
- Matthias Lehrberger; Mirrorbirds (Manfred Adler); Zwinkelman (Dominik Luttner, Josip Pavlov)
- special thanks
- Lela Rekhviashvili, everyone at Tbilisi Architecture Biennial (especially Tinatin Gurgenidze), Mariam Gegidze, Creative Europe, Goethe-Institut Georgien, Haus der Statistik, Berlinische Galerie, Nuno de Brito Rocha, Tom Steinhöfer & Milena Rutschmann
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Abb.___"Sakhli Opisi" premiered on September 19 as part of Berlin Art Week 2021 with a screening at c/o now's open-air pavilion for the Berlinische Galerie's "Park Platz" project.
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Abb.___"Sakhli Opisi" Premiere.
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Abb.___Still: Munich band Zwinkelman (Dominik Luttner, Josip Pavlov) makes a cameo in "Sakhli Opisi" when their video for "Hallo Lulo", directed by Nana Dix, appears as a film within a film.
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Abb.___As in our film for Future Architecture Rooms, Lela Rekhviashvili has again played a leading role in "Sakhli Opisi". Thank you Lela!
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Abb.___Giorgi Razmadze wrote about the Tbilisi Architecture Biennial and „Sakhli Opisi“ for the Georgian news portal publika.ge:
Tbilisi is hosting the Architecture Biennale, which once every two years offers us not only architectural pavilions and exhibitions, but also an understanding of urban space, of existing architecture.
This year, we had the opportunity to walk through the sound landscape of Tbilisi (near the Sports Palace), to directly share the existing urban space with a tactile connection to it (cleaning the Lado Garden), to see many interesting installations and to get acquainted with new theories. The Biennale brings together artists working in different mediums, which distinguishes its role as a polymedia festival.
The Biennale also hosted a screening of a cyberfilm, an event completely unknown to Georgia, which raised the issue of the reorganization of power and space in post-Soviet Georgia from a completely new perspective.
The term “cyberspace” belongs to the American science fiction writer William Gibson, who used this word to describe the conspiracy of corporations and banks. It refers to a computer network in which information collected about people is used to control them. The system is invisible to individuals, and the state has no influence on it. However, in parallel with the network of corporations, for example, in West Germany, to combat the threat of terrorism from the “Red Army Faction”, the head of the German Federal Criminal Police, Horst Herold, was already creating the first computer database in the 1970s, in which information on the movements of individuals and other types of information was collected.
Corporate power with the development of technology, reality increasingly shifted from the cyberpunk genre to real life. Electronic ecology today represents a neoliberal paradise in which the power of the state separated from corporations still almost does not exist. One of the latest events related to the expansion of cyberspace is the Covid pandemic. After limiting mobility for individuals to the maximum extent, the Internet has become almost the only opportunity for socialization. Although statistical data do not speak of trends in the growth of freedom or democracy, after the end of the pandemic and the expansion of cyberspace, in Georgia and the world we have only seen a trend of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.
The logic of capitalism is based on constant expansion. After colonialism and neocolonialism, when even the post-Soviet space was already occupied, and traveling to Mars was a relatively distant prospect, capitalism began to master a new territory in order to escape collapse - cybernetic ecology. The German architectural bureau c/o now dedicates the film Sakhli Opisi - What Do We Have in Common to this process. As one of the members of the group, Tobias Honig, says, the idea for creating the film was born during the pandemic, he wanted to come to Georgia, but the restrictions on movement did not allow this. The alternative for him, as for millions of people, turned out to be electronic resources.
The largest platform for the illusion of movement is Google's Street View service. Using this technology, the filmmakers are trying to study Georgia remotely, or rather, to process the information that is found in cyberspace. In the film, the story is framed in the framework of a television news broadcast. The image is followed by a running line of the latest news, in which the headlines of articles about Georgia in the media appear. The image and the text do not match, nor does the translation of the subtitles, which is also performed in the Google Translate system. The dissonance between the signified and the signified in cyberspace (which was first observed in Hatsune Miku's cyber opera) conveys the logic of the era - in the post-truth era, neither the image nor the text anymore reflect the truth. The Trump adviser’s talk of an alternative truth questions the truth of the offline world and elevates it to the “alternative facts” or cybernetic truths of the online world. Thus, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Telesin residence presented in the film is hyperreal. This new reality no longer needs a source text, it exists in a self-sufficient environment. In such self-sufficiency, figures can fly, walk through walls, easily change shape, and are subject to the laws of alternative physics.
Overcoming the limitations of the physical world is primarily manifested in overcoming the limitations imposed by culture. Violence in cyberspace is not subject to sanction. If large corporations increasingly control freedom of speech, we still do not see restrictions on the cultivation of murder and advertising. On the contrary, the level of violence and commercialization on the Internet is increasing every year.
The title of the film is taken from the work presented by the same group c/o now at the previous biennale, entitled “What Do We Have in Common?” This question addresses both the connection between Georgia and Germany, or the link between modern architecture and Georgia (the film begins with the biography of Wright’s wife Olga Lazovich, who spent some years in Tbilisi and was a prominent student of Gurdjieff), and the common ground between cyberreality and our reality.
Post-structuralists base their understanding of space or phenomena on the manifestation of differences. In the film, the path of finding common ground is chosen to understand the general nature of colonialism. One of the characters of Sakhli Opisi, researcher Lela Rekhviashvili, tells us about the gaze of Western capitalism on new territories, which is changed by studying the anatomy of Russian colonialism. The main line is to find the cybertoponymy of power. The authors call this journey “strollology.” Strollology (German: Spaziergangswissenschaft) is founded by the Swiss sociologist Lucius Burckhardt. The English etymology of strollology comes from the verb to stroll, which, in the case of the scientific method, implies the study of the environment through direct movement and reflection in it. Thus, in the film, we walk in cyberspace and try to create an idea of the real world by analyzing the information collected by corporations. In this case, the focus is on the transformation of post-Soviet Georgia, which raises the issue of Russian imperialism and colonialism, which is not properly studied in Western academic circles.
What does Georgia look like if we look at it from cyberspace? This is the territory of the oligarchs, on which a colonial regime exists. This oligarchic-bandit system, formed by power, manifests itself in the organization of public space that began after the collapse of the Soviet empire. In the relationship between politics and architecture, urbanist Edward Soja distinguishes a hierarchical structure. It is no coincidence that the oligarchs who have become rich in Russia own the largest buildings. The film features the wedding palace “privatized” by Badri Patarkatsishvili. From here we move on to Bidzina Ivanishvili’s business center, which is located along the Kartli River and is built on one of the main points after Mtatsminda. Smaller oligarchs are also building even more kitschy palaces above Tbilisi. Architecture becomes an urban medium of power, which must constantly produce discourse and mechanisms of social control. We can say that this circumstance is also truly common to the population of the planet.
The film is built on a visual and sound dialectic. Graphical imagery is contrasted with analog imagery, but this conflict does not give us a synthesis – an improved version of reality. After watching the film, one gets the impression that cyberspace colonialism is entering its final phase, which coincides with the current state of Georgian colonialism. Along with new challenges, it is extremely important to change the perspective of art and switch to the study of cybernetic hegemony, which offers us a new format of power. It is vital that this film by c/o new be brought to a wide audience, which would also encourage the development of Georgian cyber art.
*The opinions expressed in the blog belong to the author and may not always coincide with the editorial position.
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