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In the work ‘Humancon Undercon’ 2007, I portrayed the current situation in Georgia, the country of my origin, where things change so rapidly that the only way for people to catch up with their changing surroundings is to quickly forget the recent past. I’m concerned with our inability to perceive things in their totality - a totality that includes space and time. I believe this inability lies behind Georgia’s present condition of constant amnesia, in which we choose to overlook certain aspects of our collective past. This mindset creates a layered architecture, leaving very interesting traces of human touch on the buildings.
‘Humancon Undercon’ (decoded title: human condition under construction) consisted of series of black and white photographs printed on fabric, embroidery and miniature sculpted landscapes. These printed images showed fragments of architecture and human traces in an urban environment that has become thoroughly inhuman - large and rough manmade landscapes, half destroyed or not yet fully built buildings. I worked on the details of these images and hand-embroidered parts of them. I chose to embroider the details that showed the human touch within these no-man’s-land landscapes. The embroidered elements were detailed and nostalgic wooden railings on the non-finished parasite loggia on top of the so-called ‘Khrushchev building’, a wooden coffin made from the same wood as the wooden railing, and a finished brick wall in the middle of a concrete carcass. I chose these details in order to emphasise the imbalance or rather the hybrid situation in this reality, and to depict the character of a person living there. |