New Artist Focus: Inga Lāce on Sophio Medoidze

Listen to the audio version of this essay on Soundcloud. (Listening time: 12 minutes 23 seconds)

 

“You told me I would have to keep my distance. I agreed. Twenty metres, you said. Why twenty? Why twenty?

I told you it is a minimum distance for reading number plates in order to pass a driving 

test.”

 

Allow me to introduce the main characters featured in Sophio Medoidze’s Tusheti trilogy: the distance, the measuring fingers, Great Caucasus range, the Tushetian men, the women in distance, a woman behind the camera, the mobile network, the sheep, the racing horses.

 

We will touch upon them throughout this text, but let’s start with the dialogue. It is delivered by the voice of Sophio Medoidze behind the camera at the beginning of her experimental documentary ‘Let us Flow’ (2023), the concluding part of the Tusheti trilogy, preceded by her short films ‘Xitana’ (2019) and ‘Madoli’ (2020). The distance she refers to is one that Tusheti women must observe from shrines where yearly rituals take place, with only local men participating. The artist has followed those activities over a period of five years, gaining trust, acceptance and even friendship of the community members. ‘Let us Flow’ introduces its protagonists, some of whom, we reckon by those small informal moments of conversations with the artist, have been featured already in ‘Xitana’ and ‘Madoli’. The first two works act like introductions preparing the viewer for the choreography of the longer one, while each of them exists as separate pieces as well.

 

 

Tusheti, a historic region nestled in the mountains northeast of Sophio Medoidze’s native Georgia, can be reached through one of the most treacherous roads in the world, open exclusively during the summer months. It also stands as one of the highest inhabited villages in Europe, sharing borders with Chechnya and Dagestan, both republics of the Russian Federation. Traditionally, Tushetians have been sheep herders, exporting wool across Europe and the Russian Empire. Recent years have brought changes to the region. The dynamic of labour has shifted and more people, particularly women, are now moving downhill for work. Different economic opportunities have arisen from the surge in tourism due to the area’s popularity for mountain hiking. But perhaps the most visible daily change is the introduction of Wi-Fi access in villages, where previously a ten-kilometre walk was required to make a phone call. While these changes present opportunities, they also bring tensions within the community.

 

In Medoidze’s films those tensions unfold slowly and subtly as we follow the preparations and execution of the pre-Christian ritual celebration ‘Atnigenoba’ (or ‘Atengenoba’), organised to commemorate the lost loved ones, unfolding across Tusheti on the 100th day after Easter – usually in August. Largely unchanged from ancient times, the celebration involves various organisational roles assigned to villagers from welcoming guests to beer brewing, slaughtering sheep, and horse races for men, as well as communal feasting for all the villagers and guests. There are moments however, when the artist’s camera lands across the hillside where all the men are caught looking at their phones in an afternoon pause. Or in another moment a man is filming with his phone the proceeding of cheering after burning a small piece of wool on the forehead of a sheep, I presume, before it’s ritual killing.  

 

Beyond the socio-political realities of community life, Sophio Medoidze is also seeking to transfer deeper meaning of the ritual itself. Linking non-Western knowledge production with discipline of performance studies, Theorist Diana Taylor describes performance in its expanded sense, stating its functions as vital acts of transfer, transmitting social knowledge, memory and a sense of identity through reiterated actions, which constitute many practices and events from dance, theatre, ritual, which involve theatrical, rehearsed behaviours. As a system of learning, storing and transmitting knowledge, performance allows the expanding of what this “knowledge” is. Taylor suggests that writing and other forms of documentation have come to stand in for and against embodiment and separate the knowledge from the knower. [1] In her trilogy, Medoidze is thus deliberately moving around and beyond pure documentation, expanding what the distance between the camera, the cameraperson and the participants of the ritual could be. There is also no judgement in the artist’s gaze, when we see Tushetians engaged in self-documentation (in fact, the go-pro camera is something the artist introduces them to) but the viewer is left wondering how the proliferation of documentation might affect the ritual life to Tushetians, and whether the future function of the ritual might change from sacred mitigation to a much simpler performance.

 

 

In Medoidze’s work the preparations and the ritual itself are also a symbol of the traditional way of life – tough, enveloped in poverty, but somewhat harmonious with nature; and those are then shaken by the modernization of life that the mobile network and tourism are the harbingers of. By delving into the micro-world of social organisation of the community, Medoidze opens larger questions around remote and rural communities across the world which often serve as places of resource extraction without much consideration of their own future development from state structures. The rituals of the Tush community, their identity and geographic position may be unique, but the issues they are facing such as economic migration, changing gender dynamics and digitisation affect remote communities worldwide. 

 

Besides, another layer of the story is simply the curiosity and desires of young Tushetians to explore life beyond their villages. Her trilogy is thus another take on mobility and migration within and outside of Georgia, the effects of digitalisation of labour and rapid influx of capitalism since the collapse of the Soviet Union. In fact, Medoidze herself is an example of one such migration as she left for the UK twenty-two years ago. Her regular journeys back to Georgia, and to Tusheti during this project, become a personal return and an inversion to a process many young Tushetians are going through. She states: “my predicament of living between two countries and two tongues is shared by the Tush, who migrate to low-lying plains every winter and have to grapple with a Georgian which is markedly different to their own dialect”.

 

Sophio Medoidze follows the tradition of ethnographic surrealism, influenced by cinéma vérité and Maya Deren’s later films, problematising modernity but also successfully avoiding idealisation of village life. In the whole trilogy, Medoidze masterfully mixes everything from professional camera shots and phone footage to material filmed by body cameras of her protagonists, varying from wide shots of spectacular mountains to incredibly intimate closeups. Changing the shade of colour of the film is another way the artist toys with the atmosphere, adding the patina of indeterminate time.  Different vantage points are used, artists’ fingers enter the shots seemingly measuring the distance between the camera and the filmed; and transitions from shaky hand camera to stable shots of breathtaking landscapes take place. Indeed, as the film progresses, we realise that the Great Caucasus range is also one of the film’s main protagonists. A feeling like you’re inside the shot – immersed in the community and surrounded by the young men and women, follows moments when you realise that you’re an inevitable outsider – especially when you hear the voiceover from behind the frame. And I’m writing this as a woman, mindful of the fact that women aren’t allowed to take part in many aspects of the ritual that Medoidze has invited us into.

As mentioned earlier, Tushetians are defined by mobility, both within and outside the country – and movement is also suggested by the title of Medoidze’s work–’Let us flow’–which is a direct translation of vidinot–a common greeting in Tushetian dialect, suggesting a constant flow. It brings me to one of the parts of the ritual, which is horse racing, an embodiment of flow that can also be seen as a metaphor for racing either to adopt a modern way of life or on the contrary, to escape it, in any case the winner is never the same.

 

***

 

‘Let us Flow’ ends with people in the village watching the film in an improvised premiere of sorts in the mountains, projected on a white piece of cloth, screened when the darkness has set naturally. We see smiling faces and after the last shots one of the viewers exclaims, “we haven’t seen a documentary like this about Tusheti”. And we haven’t. The woman behind the camera has trespassed the distance.

 

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[1] Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003., p. 2, 16, 19.

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Inga Lāce is chief curator at the Almaty Museum of Arts. Lāce served as the CMAP Central and Eastern Europe Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art (2020-2023) in New York and held the position of curator at the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art from 2012 to 2022.