VOLUME first interviewed Tinatin Gurgenidze, co-founder of Tbilisi Architecture Biennial, in 2019. Five years, one pandemic and three editions later, the event keeps leading the debate around urgent topics in the caucasian republic of Georgia. We reached out to her again, a few days before the opening of their new edition “Correct Mistakes”, on the 28th of September.

Francesco Degl’Innocenti: Hello Tinatin, here we are again: you are about to open the doors to another exciting edition of the Tbilisi Architecture Biennial, titled “Correct Mistakes”: it seems to be the development of the Georgian Pavilion that TAB curated at the Venice Biennial last year.

Tinatin Gurgenidze: Yes, the theme of this year is based on the topic that we worked on for Venice. There, our focus was water. Water is the main resource that Georgia has, and we reflected also on its exploitation, its use, on many different levels. The experience of Venice influenced and inspired us to continue on this topic.

FDI: I remember that the presence of water – symbolically, and in the relation with land exploitation – was also present before Venice, at the last edition of TAB, in 2022: the landscape installation of the Georgian/Italian studio Noia (hundreds of wooden pillars planted in a seasonal lake basin would eventually be flooded with the coming of winter). So this theme has been under your radar for a long time.

TG: No doubt: our topics are always chosen in relation to the previous editions. Every edition influences the next.

FDI: And this cements your role, not only as a cultural event that happens every two years, but with a continuity. This is something that biennials sometimes lack, in the constant reinvention of the wheel. Maybe also because you decided not to hire Curators from outside: this ensures thematic continuity, and a very precise stance as an organisation. And what about the name, “Correct Mistakes”?

TG: During Soviet times there was a lot of manipulation of nature, of the environment. They used to say they were trying to “correct the mistakes of nature”: they were researching anti-hail technologies, weather engineering like cloud seeding, or experimenting with the introduction of a new species into an ecosystem. 

The sentence was our inspiration, the name has multiple interpretations.

FDI: And how will this edition develop?

TG: This year we have one main thematic exhibition located in the Institute of hydro-meteorology, an historic building of the 19th century, which is exactly where these manipulation were taking place. It is a very important ancient building, but in very bad shape. And the building itself is kind of an artefact, and it’s full of archival material which will be also part of the exhibition, together with other archival material has been collected and reproduced. So the building itself is already an exhibition in itself, to which we add different layers. From inside we want to keep the concentration on the building, while we will use the yard outside for the symposium, and a big table full of air cargo material that has been reworked especially for the exhibition.

Apart from that, we have two installations, one just outside of the building and one inside. Then, in one part we have the exhibition of the Summer School that I organised on the Black Sea at the beginning of September, still in the framework of the last Biennale.

FDI: And beyond the main exhibition space? I ask because TAB has often had the shape of a city festival, with a dense detailed program of events and activities throughout the city of Tbilisi.

TG: Yes, we have two more installations placed far from the main location, one in the outskirts on the Tbilisi sea, and other one in a suburb area about a small hidden river – there are a lot of hidden rivers in Tbilisi. Then as you said, we have film screenings organised every monday by our partner organisation, thematically connected. And we also have another exhibition opening, An Atlas of Commoning, a travelling exhibition by ARCH+ which arrived in Tbilisi after having opened in many countries.

FDI: Ah I see! Wasn’t the Commons the theme of your 2020 TAB?

TG: Exactly. Some parts we helped them explore in the local context. So it is all connected.

FDI: Fantastic! And I want to remark an important consequence of this continuity: many events become almost slaves to novelty, and their aftermath seldom gets lost. The structure of TAB instead doesn’t allow this risk. You are doing the equivalent of the post-occupancy study, the scrutiny.

Tell me, what about this year’s installations?

TG: There are four, the winners of our Open Call: one is a Georgian local architectural studio, another is an international group, from Austria, Georgia Latvia and Netherlands. Then, there is a Georgian group with one Italian member, and one installation at the Tbilisi sea by 3 Swiss architects.

FDI: I’m curious, a personal question, what gets you excited about this edition? If you were a visitor, what would you make space in your calendar for?

TG: I think the main exhibition is very important because it tells a lot of different stories. Then guided tours – we will have four guided tours: one is called Dighomi Meadows, and it is led by an activist who saves really important natural landscapes like meadows from construction waste. Another one is in a city called Rustavi, next to Tbilisi, where another activist is trying to make a recreational area by the river with urban-gardening. One is about the rivers of Tbilisi, and the last is in Chiatura, a mining town in western Georgia, where the mining company has exploited the land so much that people are having holes in their houses, rising diseases – and nobody really pays attention to it.

But rather than highlights, I think that everything that is part of the festival makes it really into a festival. So I would not want to miss anything this year, to be honest.

FDI: It sounds like TAB managed to put together another insightful edition, despite all the political problems that Georgia has faced in the last year. Do you want to say something about that?

TG: Yes. That we are proud of what we did, in spite of not having received any financial support for neither the state nor the region. It is never easy, this year even more than the last ones, so we are proud of that.

The fourth edition of TAB, Correct Mistakes, takes place from September 28 to October 19, 2024 and will unite exhibitions, workshops, installations, symposium, guided tours, film screenings, and lectures. More information: https://biennial.ge/