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Keti Chartolani: When the Streets Speak Who Takes Heed?
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When the Streets Speak Who Takes Heed?
Keti Chartolani
In September of the last year, Zura Jishkariani and I set in the Varketili mediatheque and spoke before a group of people and a bunch of cameras. The discussion was concerning the installation by Zura, located atop the building block a few streets away from that spot. A vast mirror-like, reflective surface, with Zura’s words etched on:
Have you heard a ship’s siren
in a city without sea?
As always with Zura’s conversation, this time too we touched upon a number of fields: social, political, historical, urban, cultural, abstract, human. By the end I shared my own understanding of the phrase: an echo of those lost cities that border the sea; I feel this is a kind of phantom voice, emitting phantom pain. He found it to be an interesting interpretation. Which is precisely what it was, one among many.
This too we had already discussed: a work that engages everyone walking the street beneath it in a dialogue. Here a person is not a mere passive observer: the question addresses them. A postmodern act, in a way, holding the text in a constant state of unresolved becoming. Back then I interrogated this motive, why is it valuable? Could it be that such an act may provoke more agitation?
Now – three months after our conversation, still standing there, atop the building, under that airborne question – I want to respond. During this time the installation seems to have been integrated in the urban landscape for those who live there, while I find myself to be an invasive outsider, standing on the sidewalk with my neck dropped back, staring up. In the eyes of a few passersby on this windy day I am the only intruder from the outside, excluded from the daily flux. And instinctively, and that only for a fleeting second, their eyes drift upwards, where I am gazing. I, with this wordless gesture, by casting my head upwards and keeping silence, affect their action, almost imperceptibly, but still, as if through the butterfly effect. And who knows where the resulting tsunami will rise.
At that moment I realize that what I am reading atop the building is not the same as what I read the last time. I am testing on myself the postmodern shifting, meaning-altering capacity of the text. What previously reached me as the echo of the historical pain, now comes at me from the current, urgent, politically charged. What I once saw as an observer standing by is now part of my experience. And both of these “interpretations” are equally part of the object staring down from the roof.
Zura conceived the work in the view of psychogeography, related to its derive, the conceptualization of a pointless wandering. Derive denotes movement, relocation, a flux without any specific direction or goal – physically, in the city streets, as well as metaphorically, giving oneself up to the stream of consciousness.
The situationists were quite outspoken about the many benefits of such an act. One is dropping out of the monotony of being and the spontaneous grasp of the surroundings, freshly attuning the senses to physically experience the present moment, the overturn of that social norm which sets pragmatic outlook, according to which time is transferable to money, as the main human value. And it also prompts the impulse for political action: derive can help reveal an urban alienation, thus feeding critical thinking, potentially capable of inspiring a collective movement that can transform the cities and societies. Indeed, even here the politics is inescapable, nor shall we attempt to evade it.
Because standing here now, on the windy January day of the year 2025, I take this installation to be the part of that political manifesto that the dwellers of Tbilisi are writing daily by marching the streets.
Symbolic urbanism, of which this installation is a specimen, inquires not only about the cultural values but also the political views of the society, as expressed by the organization of the urban spaces. It claims that the urban environment is much more that its functional spaces where we live, work and move about. It also reflects and, in a way, forges the social identity, the power structures and even historical memory.
And I strongly believe that Tbilisi is exceptionally charged with political meanings. Here even the types of construction bare names of the political leaders. We have Stalinist architecture, khrushchevkas, buildings from the Brezhnev era. It is well worth noting here, too, that these are all the ruling figures of the empire that invaded our country and, therefore, the architecture of Tbilisi, as well as the language that describes it, carries a certain historic trauma.
This trauma, ingrained as it is both architecturally and linguistically, affects our identity and self-perception. And when the new body is forced into this architecture and language, be it a vast, reflective surface, mounted on a rooftop of one of the buildings in one of the streets in Varketili, posing a question about liminal space to us, the passersby, it is a form of therapy.
The co-creative synergy between a geographic space and a literary text comes under the scrutiny of a relatively new branch of study called geogriticism. According to the methodology of this approach, the spaces represented in a literary text always says something meaningful about the text’s relation towards the empirical reality. Put differently, geographic spaces rendered literary is a tool for criticizing reality. Some of the most powerful in this regard are the works of science fiction or utopian literature that present a rectified version of the “actual” reality. Utopia, in such instances, signifies not only a cartographic enigma, but also a historical goal, as it addresses a placelessness which is, at the same time, a longed-for “good place.”
It is precisely a possibility of existence of such a placelessness that this eleven-word phrase by Zura envisions: an in-between space where a ship’s siren can resound in the sealess city. And such is envisioned in order to prompt the listless wandering of thoughts. But being a part of urban landscape also means that a city dweller or a visitor can run into it by accident.
Meanwhile, I stand right here and feel as if I’d committed a sin, betraying the essence of the work. Today I came here on purpose, looking up the location on google maps so as not to get lost, not to take the wrong turn somewhere. My coming here was anything but purposeless: I came here so I could later write this text. What have I done?! What’s the point of writing these words, arrived at in this manner? And what’s the value of writing words today anyway, when they have all lost meaning, when “black” describes white, “friend” – a foe. And when you call a white a white, a foe a foe, you discover in terror that your words have lost power and if so, how is one to communicate truth, even one’s own…
And here I catch my thoughts drifting towards some uncharted spaces. That the airborne text has done the trick. And, whereas today a aimless wander has become a luxury, the aim towards which we had out into the streets is well worth this temporary lack.
“If you’ve noticed that after so much running and marching your love for your country has grown, that is partly due to the fact that being able to walk on foot in the city brings joy” – these words belong to Mindia Arabuli, dating back to December.
Wandering is essentially aimless, while our streets have turned into the roads aimed at our purposes. I almost feel as if the one that goes out with no purpose is discarded with scorn, like dirt from one’s body.
And this is because when the words lose meaning, the streets begin to talk.
But we need to take heed.
