Carousel Bazaar
16 Oct 2020Station 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.