CGI prints and an audio piece. 2020 – 2021

‘‘Woman laughs at night’’ is a project created for Subtropical Cultures 2020 – a residency program aimed to use art as a tool for trustful exchanges between artists representing the con ict divided sides – Georgian, Abkhazian.
This work circles around a poem by Abkhaz poetess Neli Tarba (1934- 2014), which I discovered in Georgian translation during my research on women poets in the Caucasus region.
Unfortunately, there is no original – Abkhaz version included in the audio because of certain complications.
The title ‘’Woman laughs at night’’ itself is a statement and connects with an image I was thinking about since a long time: a fantasy of a reading performance event in the mountains. The poem shows the beauty of communication, relation, and the power of expressing one’s inner voice.
This Fantasy image connects with a third dimension of the project. It is a spontaneous photograph taken of me years ago on the Georgian Osse- tian border. My gaze is directed towards the Ossetian side where I tried to spot my grandmother’s village.
My grandmother’s village was in South Ossetia. She and her siblings
left it when they were teenagers and children as they were sent to various foster houses. The name of the village Berijvari was changed after the Goergian – Ossetian war in 2008 ( it is the only village in that area that can not be found on google map) possibly the settlement does not exist anymore. No one in our family besides my grandmother can enter South Ossetia today. I have a dear fantasy of that place from the stories my grandmother told me.
When cultures, communities are detached from one another or some- times even lost, however, complicated the situation can be, I think there is an urgency to hear their stories and also to create new narratives, hence there is the setting of reading performance in my work. This work is a form of an invitation for speaking, and amplifying voices.

A