Birches

What is happening?

The source footage was shot on an old camera my mother gave me. Because of a malfunction, it recorded the world not as a whole but through a narrow vertical strip. The selection happened without me: the camera decided for itself what would reach the film. I was filming children sledding down winter hills. But the fragmented vertical strips distorted the image, and from a distance the frames read as silhouettes of birch trees. Up close, what was actually filmed emerges: human figures, a cityscape. I assembled a collage from these shots and cut it into pieces. The fragments exist as physical objects, and their order changes from one showing to the next. The work holds together in any configuration, from several elements down to a single one, and remains itself however the pieces are rearranged.

What is it about?

We inherit not a clear set of meanings but a web of images, objects and unspoken words. Some of it is handed down directly; some stays in silence. Marianne Hirsch calls this postmemory: a past you never lived through yourself but carry within you. It shapes us before we can ask where it comes from, and what feels like our own way of seeing often turns out to be a form received in advance.
At some point, the inheritance begins to raise doubts. You want to separate what is yours from what was imposed, to reach the self beneath the layers of someone else’s. But the deeper you sift through what you’ve inherited, the clearer it becomes that the self you are looking for may not exist apart from it.




The work was shown at the solo exhibition Soil in Tbilisi, as well as at the TPAF and Blazar fairs.