Friction zone | 2025

Fieldwork documentation | photograph

 

 

 

In the damp mist of Lagodekhi, beneath the canopy of Georgia’s oldest forest, a river etches the border like a stylus on the skin of the earth. The Matsimis Tskali - a watercourse that is both wound and suture - carves its path between roots and geopolitics, while the trail, obediently, traces its contour. Here, nature is not landscape but a living archive: each stone, a record; each shadow, a code deciphered only by the soldiers guarding the boundary.

 

To walk here is to negotiate with the State. Midway, a military checkpoint emerges like an absurd ready-made: passports are displayed, names logged in green-covered notebooks, and the traveler’s body becomes biometric data. Cameras dangle from trunks like metallic fruit, capturing movement and converting it into algorithms of suspicion. The forest is no longer sublime - it is a surveillance system where branches bend into angles of monitoring.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Monitoring camera on the forest trail between Georgia and Azerbaijan | Lagodheki, 2025.

 

 

 

 

Drawing depicting the natural border - the course of the Matsima Tskali River.

 

 

 

 

Recorders harvest the whisper of water mingling with the crackle of satellite antennas; sketches in soft notebooks document the tension between foliage and barbed wire fences; photographs freeze the moment a bird crosses the border without documents. The GPS, meanwhile, traces broken lines in the air - speculative geographies where the river is simultaneously map and trap.

 

What emerges from this obstinate documentation?

A choreography of control, of course, but also a palimpsest of absences: the bear’s trail avoiding cameras, the echo of Azeri conversations erased by wind, the silence of stamped passports that will never return. The trail, after all, is not a path - it is an open question about how far art can infiltrate the cracks of power without being swallowed by the same bureaucracy that regulates the trees.

 

 

Taking Measures is an ongoing project in the Greater Caucasus Mountains that deals with practices of walking and measuring, as well as the political potential for power and resistance that results from these practices.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Field recording along the trail | Azerbaijan-Georgia border, 2025.

 

 

 

 

Fieldwork documentation | photograph | Fortress Machi trail, 2025