Georgia by Adam Pańczuk

Mother

For the most part, they were to be pictures of ceilings, windows – the scenery that immobile war veterans see in front of their eyes. Images they will be doomed to watch till the end of their lives. After calling Timur, who, as I had earned earlier, has no hands and legs, I knew my plan must fail. Being a helpful man, Timur proposed to pick me up with his car after work. As we were riding, he took off his artificial limbs to show me how to drive without them.
I began to wonder what force makes a man go to war. I was soon told that you cannot look away when they are attacking your mother. Your country is your mother.
I met many disabled veterans and none of them regretted their decision to fight. They were as determined to live normally as they had been determined to go to war. However, their lives changed radically. Most of them were unable to work or earn their living. They could not support their families, they lived on their own.
Malkhaz sold his house to buy proper artificial limbs made in Germany. The struggle to survive began. In the Caucasus, the presence of war is still felt intensely and visible in everyday lives. It is perceived in a completely different way here than in Western Europe. I tried to understand why it is so easy for people to take a decision that puts their lives at stake.  How can you, in a matter of seconds, change the shovel you are using to dig the foundations for your garage for a rifle and go to the front.
Adam Pańczuk

The project presentation in Warsaw

Georgia by Rafał Milach

Chasing a White Horse ( working title)

The charismatic president of Georgia Mikheil Saakashvili had a dream and a plan. For nearly a decade of his leadership, he strived to mould the Caucasian country according to western models. Georgia was to be a germ of Western thinking and civilisation in that part of the world – in the direct neighbourhood of the growingly powerful Russia. Futurist visions of new cities and glass houses were brutally pasted into Georgian scenery. However, the implant never became fully functional and the dream, backed by investments running into billions, came to a standstill. Chasing a White Horse is a search of the traces left behind by the authoritarian ruler.

Rafał Milach

Armenia by Michał Łuczak

Spitak

The scenery here is soaked with resignation. All you can do is look at the mountains and imagine you are in Scandinavia – Norway, or even Iceland. Rocky peaks and mild slopes overgrown with fine grass. Landscape green from the ground and blue from the sky. An unambiguous and stark scenery. The decisions about the scenery were taken years back and are irrevocable. Just starkness and scorching sun. Then your eyes slide down from the hills to the valleys, falling on man-made features, signs of human presence. That's Spitak. There can be no doubt. All over the place, your eyes are stung by evidence that something began here, but was soon abandoned in resignation.  Unfinished roads, bridges, houses, plants, barns, petrol stations. As if the people here lost their faith halfway through and simply left, perhaps to seek luck elsewhere. The road winds its way across an area full of failed hopes. We enter the city, parking on the central square. The place is buzzing. Here and there things are transported by car or carried, pulled or towed. A rug, couch, an old closet, a coil of wire or plastic tubes, several gypsum boards, a pile of bricks. The people keep building something. Or possibly, they have just ended building or are about to build. And then they will abandon all this? Perhaps they have simply run out of patience, perhaps they can still remember the earthquake, the horizon full of debris? Or maybe they simply realise that there is no point in all this only after they start, once they bring in the bricks, set up the formwork, mix the cement? That is why they stop. Yet, soon they forget about their resignation, with a new flame lighting up in them, a new impulse of change. So they start anew. And so it goes on over and over again. As long as it takes. 

Filip Springer

 

All the Yerevan is here. Our student show in Dalan Art Gallery.

Leave'n'stay. The face of Migration. Our exhibition in Yerevan.

Andrei Liankevich in Armenia

Being in Armenia for the second trip, Andrei Liankevich had a meeting in Mirzoyan Library about the project and his own work September 15th. It looks like our project develops before the end. Final stories to be published soon.