The Theatrics of Bread

Tbilisi, 27 of January 2022

While in Tehran, one of the most eye capturing scenes I stopped to observe was the bread making process: the dialectic of the bread as banal as it might seen it is in fact, perhaps, the oldest performance in existence today.

And ode to Peace.

Was a winter night, an old man with his comfortable pajama like clothes was preparing the levitated dough, cutting it, baking in, baking out, selling the bread, working on the new dough, restarting the circle: every step with extreme delicacy was an invitation to be patient: his bakery was not envelop by walls but by a big glass, next to a smaller door also made out of glass.

The smell of the hot bread was enough to forget about the cold, enough to feel at peace with my surroundings.

As the English word suggests, bread is a derivative onomatopoeia of proto-german origins that remind us of the effervescence, to a boiling sound and image; it has also been thought that bread recalls the idea of breaking to pieces which with a bit of poetical interpretation is not far away to the effervescence image of a liquid breaking free.

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.

Night Abstractions

Tbilisi, Nights, 2019

The night here is a whirlpool: it gets sucked down the scenography of a city that does not show you anything stamped in its crooked walls: in Tbilisi all the fun is mostly underground, be it a classical music concert, an experimental electronic venue, a hip hop performance, an improvise party on a hill, a hard techno event, a funky disco night, an unexpected and extraordinary meeting up to the room of an overprice hotel with who could have been the one for the rest of life, a soulmate connection under the balcony vines, a friendship cultivated on the cracks of empty alleys, a pleasant winter re-encounter, a grotesque showcast of liveless spirits, a sad reminder of social divisions, a boring bar, an unexpected joint, obscure wines...

Chairs

Tbilisi, first half of November, 2019

Far from the monumental avenues of the city center, from those other avenues that connect the outskirt of the city, a web of small road are interconnected: they compose sub-neighbourhoods: micro-cosmos.

Near the office where I work, in Nazaladevi – the name means taken by force – so in the area that was taken by force there is a small residential areas that constitutes a modular reality.

Still Nature

Tbilisi, early October, 2019

..mission failed to a kakhetian adventure: came too late to the marshutka.

I discovered the samgori bazaar: after the one in Station Square this one is quite special.