We decide to publish few chapters from Esma Berikishvili's book "Eurasian Laboratory:Poetry,Prose and Music in Georgia" - socio-anthropologic research about earlier activities of our smArt Groupware.
the book will introduce you to the brief history of Georgian cultural field and state ideology, 80-90s underground art and contemporary art-practice by smART-GROUPware ELY -- through the prism of Bourdieu's field theory and Cohen's theory of Symbolic communities.
the whole pre-version of the book you can read here:
you can purchase the book here:
<The artistic wonderland of Georgia - full of passion, breeze of Chernobyl, five floors Khrushovka's, professor grandfathers and drug addict fathers, black sea and mains of Chiatura, beautiful girls and boys, abandoned industrial buildings and dreams about Georgian Cosmonavtica - seen through theoretical prism. The book takes you to the world of Georgian artists who in their twenties experienced war, fear, darkness, cold, drug addiction, alcoholism, three unsuccessful attempts to build the state and consequently became abhorrent enough to "dance on the ruins". Follow the book and let new artistic viruses in.>
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Chapter
3: “Eurasian Laboratory”
In
the following chapter I will discuss the emergence of “Eurasian
Laboratory”. I will show how
the
art collaboration was formed, the priorities and goals that they try
to archive, how the
“alternative”
community is constructed and how it establishes the “alternative”
social and
cultural
space for performing without any symbolic violence. I will be looking
at different
projects
that “Laboratory” runs and illustrate how they produce knowledge
which is an
alternative
to the State discourse. I will also demonstrate the external
influences on
“Laboratory’s”
art and expose how this particular art group struggles for
legitimation: “for the
right
to monopolize the exercise of “symbolic violence” (Swartz
1997:123).
3.1
Georgian Underground in 1980-1990