Laying in wait; Tbilisi. Scoping things out, looking for touchstones, points of orientation – some sense-making mediators in the vicissitudes of Second World Eurasia where the contradictions of fast-paced capital and semi-abandonment develop as visible scabbing wounds, throwing up cultural oddities, social malaise, uneven protrusions: the wet-stuff of life as execrescence of the city’s vital matter.
Giwi Margwelaschwili passed away early on in the pandemic, March 2020, at a time when it was difficult to process exactly what it meant. I had heard about him from A as he was an old family-friend, someone who had spent time between Germany and Georgia and with whom there were certain affinities. In fact we were living in Wedding, Berlin, where he had lived at some point; A had visited him at the bottom of his plattenbau in Gesundbrunnen, regaling me with tales of this sweet man and his flat strewn with books and papers. It gave colour to an alienating urban expanse: Mitteleuropa and the Soviet bloc, places that I was more familiar with as tools of political discourse and cultural adornment rather than the social totalities that emanated through their environs. I was learning for sure.
Giwi hinted at something else, a postcolonial memory within and outside Europe, a sort of ab-use of Eurocentrism, so to speak. An emigrant seriousness, fixed to translation and the text. These were stories I was hearing through discussion; ironic that his work hasn’t been translated to English, having mainly been written in German (at a level far beyond my capability). But there was a trace. A diasporic one.
He has this idea around ontotextuality, something around the question of life-being as always founded and mediated through the text. Something which he has developed in his philosophical writings, and gone on to enact after the Soviet dissolution in his auto-fictional series on Kapitän Wakusch. And so we watch ‘Zuschauerräume’ [Spectator Spaces] early on settling into Tbilisi. It's a serious re-presentation of a scene from his Wakusch series entangling the idea of viewership and baroque historicity. It is definitely a strange film, difficult and obtuse, and presumably much like his oeuvre, and elicits this desire to watch it as text itself.
We also watch ‘Kapitän Wakusch’ which is a more straightforward documentary, picking up on the whimsy and melancholy of his life. From his beginnings as a Georgian emigrant’s son in Berlin, very much surrounded with swing music and joviality, through to his internment into a gulag during the second world war, resulting in his effective deportation to Georgia. In subsequent years he becomes a philosopher, and returns to Germany in the 1990s before spending the last years of his life in Tbilisi. There are tender moments with his East German friend Ekkehard Maas, and music, dancing…
There is something here about retracing and excavating the past, making sense of the project of Europe from its wayward interlopers, abstracting and reconfiguring the gloopy substrates and unleavened sediments. I have not made full sense of it, nor will I probably, but it feels important, untold, and an interesting corrective against flattening, deracinated narratives on both regions (Germany and the Caucasus, Europe and the near East, the EU and the Soviet Union, the overlapping of various imperial polities: all the various descriptors that could be levelled). But that wouldn’t really bear onto the inner truth of the matter.
Every movement, displacement, is somehow doubled, and this is very apparent in Giwi’s predicament gesturing at something wider; where explanation and self-analysis persistently gnaws at an inner-being. Various models of assimilation run roughshod over this, often transposing these ideas into political or civic forms of engagement which smoothes the messiness of subjectivity. Language becomes a point of preponderance, where it feels as if the alienating features of racial capitalist modernity can be interrogated and supplanted. A poeticism at the point of gesture, marking the interlacing of constriction and openness, sparsity as the key to a destructuring, somewhere between meaning and doing. This isn’t necessarily holistic, but also defers from the question of origin–textual, intellectual or otherwise–, somewhere between ab- and an-originary conceptions, leaving the self open to the ephemerality of dwelling when closing the chapter is a way off, in a different room altogether.
The diasporic trace
Beautifully written!