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SAVA: Screening of Tekla Aslanishvili’s A State in A State
13 March 2024, 6:30 pm–8:00 pm
A screening of Tekla Aslanishvili’s A State in A State (2022) introduced by scriptwriter Evelina Gambino (University of Cambridge) in the framework of SAVA Research Week III on Infrastructures of Progress.
This event is free.
Event Information
Open to
- All
Availability
- Yes
Cost
- Free
Organiser
-
Reuben Fowkes
Location
-
IAS ForumG17, ground floor, South WingUCL, Gower St, LondonWC1E 6BTUnited Kingdom
A State in a State (2022, 47’) is an experimental documentary film by Georgian artist Tekla Aslanishvili that follows the construction, disruption, and fragmentation of railroads in the South Caucasus and Caspian regions. It examines railways as the technical materialisation of the fragile political borders that have reemerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Revolving around the scenes of delay and waiting that constitute cargo mobility, the film reads the optimistic narratives about the New Silk Road against the grain. It observes how the iron foundation of connectivity can be used as a weapon of exclusion and geopolitical sabotage. Dotting the same lines, other forms of sabotage are deployed by workers to disrupt the political violence. Looking at historic and current practices of resistance A State in a State explores the potential of railroads for building a different, infrastructural consciousness and the lasting, transnational, kinship among the people who live and work around them. The film is developed in artistic-scientific collaboration with Dr. Evelina Gambino, Margaret Tyler Research Fellow in Geography at Girton College, University of Cambridge.
The Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts (SAVA) is a visual arts led interdisciplinary research project that challenges the West-centric discourses of the Anthropocene by asserting the constitutive role of the environmental histories of Socialism in the formation of the new geological age. Led by Dr. Maja Fowkes at UCL Institute of Advanced Studies, the project was selected for a Consolidator Grant by the European Research Council (ERC) and is funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). www.sava.earth
About the Speakers
Tekla Aslanishvili
Filmmaker based in Berlin
Tekla Aslanishvili (b. Tbilisi, 1988) is an artist, filmmaker and essayist based between Berlin and Tbilisi. Her works emerge at the intersection of infrastructural design, history and geopolitics. Tekla graduated from the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts in 2009 and she holds a MFA from the Berlin University of the Arts—the department of Experimental Film and New Media Art. Aslanishvili’s films have been screened and exhibited internationally at PACT Zollverein, Neue Berliner Kunstverein, Baltic Triennial, Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Kasseler Dokfest, Kunsthalle Münster, EMAF—European Media Art Festival, Videonale 18, Tbilisi Architecture Biennial. She is a 2018–2019 Digital Earth fellow, the nominee for Ars-Viva Art prize 2021 and the recipient of the Han Nefkens Foundation—Fundació Antoni Tàpies Video Art Production Award 2020.
Evelina Gambino
Margaret Tyler Research Fellow at University of Cambridge
Evelina Gambino is Margaret Tyler Research Fellow in the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge. Her research is concerned with a situated analysis of global logistics. Working across large infrastructures in the Republic of Georgia and the South Caucasus, she seeks to map the ways in which planetary projects of circulation, such as the Belt and Road Initiative, are translated into local contexts. In dialogue with feminist critiques of capitalism, her analysis highlights the different kinds of work that this translation entails. Recent publications include a co-authored entry on ‘Infrastructure’ in the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Anthropology (2023) and a chapter on ‘Big Dick Energy at the End of the World: Technopolitics for a Global Hustle’ in an edited volume on Gendering Logistics (2021). She has collaborated as scriptwriter on the video works A State in a State (2022) and The Stone of Hell (2021).