echoes
and
excavations
(2025)
Creative process | Installation
Photography | Drawing
Video | Sound
/
EN | PT
The sounds, processed and recombined, reveal everything from geological whispers to reverberations of ancestral gestures, crafting a soundscape that dialogues with the labyrinthine spatiality of the site. Here, sonic nuances not only map the physical topography but also unearth symbolic layers: silenced voices, forgotten rituals, and the echo of bodies that once inhabited these crevices between the sacred and the mundane. The work thus proposes a sonic excavation, in which the caves’ acoustics become a metaphor for memory itself - porous, fragmented, and forever resonating with what was once lived.
echoes and excavations | 2025
Field recording in the caves of
Uplistsikhe, Georgia
‘Echoes and Excavations’ transforms the sonic geography of the Uplistsikhe cave complex - an archaeological site stratified by millennia of human habitation - into an auditory cartography of memory. Through recordings captured within its cavities, ravines, and subterranean chambers, the piece explores the acoustic modulations generated by the irregular architecture of the rock formations, where each resonance carries traces of distinct temporalities.
echoes and excavations | 2025
Recordings amplifying the whisper of the wind through excavated holes. These holes served various historical periods of occupation.
echoes and excavations | 2025
Fieldnotes and sketches
In the time-sculpted landscapes of Uplistsikhe, an ancient city carved into volcanic rock in Georgia, human excavations transcend mere survival or functionality. Each cavity, winding corridor, and primitive altar carries within its concave forms not only the marks of ancestral tools but also an intimate geography of silenced stories. This work proposes a sensory immersion into these honed voids, where depressions in the rock - some rounded like shells, others elongated like scars - become receptacles of invisible resonances. By investigating the materiality of these structures, it asks: what echoes, both sonic and symbolic, might emerge from spaces that once housed forgotten rituals, conversations, and daily lives? The rocks themselves, silent witnesses to millennia, transform here into membranes between the past and present, inviting us to listen to what history has not recorded.
The series Echoes and Excavations unfolds through photographs capturing the rough texture of cavities, videos exploring the dance of light across uneven surfaces, drawings mapping the topography of absence, and sound recordings amplifying the whisper of wind through cracks and empty chambers. Each artistic medium acts as a translational device, converting stone’s stillness into fluid narratives. The concave formations - at times resembling hollow orbits, at others niches of contemplation; - are reinterpreted as spaces of resonance where silence becomes raw material for acoustic imagination. By interrogating the relationship between fullness and void, sound and memory, the project does not merely document an archaeological site but reclaims excavation as a poetic act: to dig is also to unearth ghosts, allowing echoes from other times to reinvent their place in the now.
echoes and excavations | 2025
Ancient excavations in the volcanic rock.
Different patterns give a particular resonance, as well as a unique visual aesthetic.
echoes and excavations | 2025
Ancient rock-hewn cave, known as the Theatre. It was probably a temple from the 1st or 2nd century AD, where religious mystery plays may have been performed.