Epigram

Guria, days of summer, 2020

Beyond the relations we build with our own kind, there is another category of relation which is able to assign to our anthropocentric reality the resemblance of a fairy tale.

According to Huizinga a fundamental element that brings together various animal species is the intrinsic ability to play games: the act of playing as an universal language: a simulacrum: a moment of suspension in which tacit non written rules and fantasy behaviors are abided: the ability of playing is a strong signal - non necessarily the only – of the presence of consciousness since it demonstrate the capability to distinguish one dimension from another: one in which rules are set by our instincts of survival from one artificial and sewed with imagination.

Chickens belong to that category of animals intelligent enough, but unfortunately too naive, to be excellent playing partners, however due to our different natures and expectations the logics of the game leave open spaces of incomprehension that are often solved in a tragic and theatrical manner.

The protagonist of this story are nine dammed chickens, one sweet and fierce grandmother, few new friends, T., and me.

The scenography is the gurian countryside, a subtropical garden at the bottom of the skirt of the mistic Gomismta: Komli the name of our stage of fairy tales: we'd like to call them reality shows.

Summer falls on the chest of an obstinate and long lasting sun: journeys start with the call to breakfast. Chickens are awake, they are anxious in their chicken-house, they are hungry: they look like automats, they don't lay eggs, they only eat and yell.

To feed the chickens is a rite of passage: it is not just a simple task, it is the construction of an affectionate bond.

Nine are the chicken: all white: all the same: all boring: all interested in eating: all with a fixed and nervous stare.

\ Diba!Diba! Diba! Diba! Is the hymn that punctually two times a day we use to call them: we open the gates of their dorms, we feed them, they go around in the vastity of the garden, they eat insects, the fallen fruits from the trees, they wander around, they drink water, they rest under the shadow, they are brought back to their dorms before night sets, they sleep.

Flashes nº1

Tbilisi, 21 of November, 2020

When facing the question on how to compose and adventure that lasted several months in which the memory of it has been modeled into un unicum: a black room in which photos are constantly develop but are not connected to each other in spite of being complete.

I take the genial suggestion of L. Try and tell the story backwards.

It starts like this:

To write to shrink time and exhaust the brain. Food was eaten. Movie is over.

Not anymore Gomismta but the wall from the neighboor house and the view of the TV tower illuminated by the sunrays and the bright sky: it is the second day of self isolation among hibernations, fast foods, and square centimeters of bricks, artificial light, and books that grow thinner with the same rythm of time.

Is an empty day, in a capsule after a long dream.

On the night sky, stars are only a spiritual presence, Jupiter and Saturn are the lone Christmas decoration of the Tv tower, Mtasminda looks like a consolation price.

Phone calls are over, I want to go to bed.

I. brought me food, we met after several months. Unfairly brief. I want to get drunk.

\ I woke up wanting to be Covid Positive. To gather with other Covid Positive friends, with the immune ones. To end this scare tactic. To have not to worry anymore about catastrophic narratives. To learn to have fun while losing.

Rain is a portal to a new winter season: the night the only way to restart and comprenhend the new diurnal dilemmas ahead: one last beer in total freedom in a place worthy of nasty customer, of soul mistreaters.

“She is my girl, I don’t share her with anyone, I’m sorry: let’s instead have a toast for good health, for our meeting, and for Georgia, good bye and good luck: another day we will drink our souls away!”

Is not even 10 pm: I already feel in the middle of the darkest point of the humid november night: on our mind and intentions there was only that cold beer, in any kind of dirty bar, among any sort of humanity.

It rains, and rains, and rains: my feet are wet, her feet are wet. They were cold, now they are wet: better cold or wet?

There is always traffic here to welcome us, to slow us down, in darkness it feels even slower, and under the rain the city appears alien: it emerges from the asphalt and it precipitates up in the air giving us the illusion of the scenography to flying thoughts: traffic is more excrusiating than a long sharp trip.

Snows and we are encapsulated. There is heavy wind: we are encapsulated. Cold feet.

After the only stop, we ate, we contemplate what does purgatory looks like in the middle of a trip, with our evercold feet: I want to reach home and collapse.

Martshutka drives are also mental: I do not want to hear anyone, to think of anyone, to talk to anyone: silence here is not the same as meditation, but I am short on words on how to translate it.

Outside of the window I see workers building the new chinese road: what an absurdity is the progress framed between sickened houses of unwell countryman. Soon we will forget them, we will forget everything on this present: this is how progress look from the windows of those houses: to make space to something that won’t belong to us.

Mountains swift fast and endlessly, snowed and mystic: beauty is also the far away silence in between a more intimate one.

Winter is here. I was not expecting to say good bye to Guria talking in Italian with a russo/armenian man, who learnt Italian listening to catholic tv shows.

He had bright and sad eyes.

We need to eat fast, martshutka is leaving at noon, it seems that the day is already over: Gomismta is covered in snow and light, those huge clouds are similar to silver buffaloes.

Morning is still a flowing river, tweeting birds, a stair next to a kaki tree, the wind, the certainty that Venus and Mercury are rising before the sun but today they are undercover.

Night last longer. One movie divide it by a tenth of its lenght. The afternoon push me to Tbilisi, make me think of…

Guria is still blushing in green.

I am waiting for an important update regarding the virus.

To be continue..

Carousel Bazaar

Station Square, Tbilisi, anyday, 2019 - 2020

At the entrance: only the wealthier merchants with their plentiful stands, full with all the fruits and vegetables of the season, with the preserves, with the sweets, their wines: they smile, they invite to stop and taste, to talk, to buy.

We go on: our feet seem to be attached to a tapiz roulant: the stands are a similar to a ride on the condition of men, of his long and fast survival.

Step by step the marketplace turns monothematic, monocromatic: improvised stands with cardboads, old wrinkled boxes comparable to the lines of the faces of who is selling and, at the same time, appears bored in front of the flooding crowds, in front of their loud phones, their tv sets, the boredom of the ones who suffer and fatigue.

Only potatoes, onions, carrots, cabbages, radiant fruit, aromatic erbs, monowhite cheeses, fish: at the end of the alley the light seems to take us down, we appear bigger: the stands seem smaller, close to the earth, and its all repetition again: potatoes, onions, carrots, a colofour monocromia of only one kind of fruit, of only one kind of vegetable, or a lazy collage of both: a moving frame: the modest garden, the solitary farmer.

Out of the tunnel we reach the railway. By their side the elderly gipsy women, the eternal widowess, cloths on their heads, some others on the grey floor, sitted in tiny chairs: they look like dolls, with their bowed bodies, and few golden teeth: they invite the walkers as if they were praying to their small piece of market with their vegetables covered in dark soil and oblivion, their fruit fighting not the get too ripe.

At the train tracks, on the open air, under any kind of weather: we go up to the end line: we find the last ones, grounded with almost nothing to sell, the same stuff of the ones close by but only the scraps, the left overs, the solitude of end of the corridor: one of the ribs of this big, enourmous, bazaar.

Yerevanian cavities

Yerevan, May, 2019

Perceptions are a concatenation of matured experiences, of prejudices, of historical research, of ideas, of illusions.

Every place we visit it's not only cover with this veil of ideas more or less elaborated that little by little wear out once we enter in contact with the forms that decorate, occupied and modifies those spaces; but places are also covered with a second, deeper, veil: every country tell us, through unconscious echoes, a story: every country, in our contemporaneity, devote itself, as if it were a marketing issue, to sell, to promote, it becomes the creator and actor of a very specific narrative, of its own propaganda.

It is not always an easy experience, neither complete, to visit a place, nor is always possible to penetrate in its intimacy.

There are limits: limits that modify those perceptions: once fluid they solidify, they blend, transmutate: we keep visiting a place not only because we like it but because it did not fool us, it seduced us, it was coherent in its vices and virtues, it stimulated us, it disarmed us.

Armenia, the sad and impoverished Armenia, for me represents, to this day, the country that has challenged this reasoning the most: I did not have any local interlocutors, the country, its cities, its messy homogeneity, represented only a scenic background that with the days revealed itself as an invading, annoying, ugly, distressing one.

The almost mythological imaginary was collapsing: carefully crafted and sponsored by the omnipresent and tidily organize diaspora appeared fake.

The county, geographically speaking, is nothing less than a corridor, the small anteroom of a world that is no longer the echo of the European civilizations openly competing with the middle eastern ones, it lies trapped and conditioned between the neo ottoman Turkey and the turkophile and turkophone Azerbaijan; Georgia – the garden of God – emerges over its slender body, and its tight feet create a funnel towards Persia. Yes, Armenia, reminds me of an anteroom, an alley with bricked windows, where tiny drops of light are filtered, an alley covered with dusty, millenarian books, instruments, mesmerizing objects, a mutilated and mistreated place.

Gorgestan ski resort

Fereydunshar, 27 of December, 2019

Diaspora: dispersion: dissolution: a forced transplant: resiliance: memory.

I

Georgia became in a short time a personal thing. The designated limits of its dimension turned out to be a comfortable knitting and its borders special bridges connecting territories that haven’t been spoiled by the progress of the boring, unifying, and alienating globalization of the 21st century, made of white smiles and glimmer.

While Georgia could be compare to an observation tower from which to look the merge of peoples and cultures, Iran has remain loyal to its image of bellybutton of the world in spite of the big theocratic veil in which is covered.

Not always a trip comply with expectations and itineraries: often travelling is a collection of death hours, or is a bulimic activity, an excessive consume of places, things, foods, drinks, people, roads, smell..a nevrosis