Art is meeting in progress, said Grzegorz Hańderek, standing beside his open-air installation in Krasnogruda. Fragments of barbed wire grow over a dead tree — a hollowed-out trunk stripped of its crown, a totem. In the calm rhythm of the Krasnogruda park, the silver shimmer of light feels as unexpected as the barbed line piercing the forest along the border with Belarus. But the wire on our tree climbs upward, burrowing into moss and mottled bark, searching for paths, for a way forward. Watching its movement, listening to the rustle of the barbed ivy, we find ourselves beneath the open sky. That other fence, stretched along the border, stands still, dividing the world into sides, repelling animals, separating people from one another — cutting through what should be entangled. Hendera/Helix works on multiple senses: touching it, you see images — and for Grzegorz Hańderek, the work is also something that exists in silence, or at least beyond words. A listening silence was somehow with us throughout all the meetings — and from that silence the need for rebellion arises.
Today, the Georgian flag carries new meanings — it has become a nearly forbidden symbol. People holding it on the street are immediately arrested, because they are likely heading to a protest. Young demonstrators hide it in their pockets, inventing new strategies to outrun a system that learns fast, developing ever more precise tools of oppression and social fracture. We heard about the Georgian revolution from Nino Lomadze, Salome Asatiani, Magda Nowakowska, and Medea Metreveli. From the decades of protests and the recent months of unrest, a complex reality has emerged — one that no longer fits into familiar frames of populism. The country’s Soviet past — its ghosts — still haunts the collective memory. Georgia’s oligarchized political reality offers few alternatives today, and the time for revolution and democratic transformation may be slipping away amidst the ongoing protest impasse. Losing this moment may also mean that revolution can no longer rely on peaceful means alone.
The second screening in the Dilemma Cinema series tied together yesterday’s threads, transporting them into yet another dimension, filling our thoughts with new imagery. “Taming the Garden” by Salomé Jashi is a film that sparked widespread debate in Georgia. Though funded by government sources, it eventually had to go underground — true to the logic of rebellion. At the heart of the film there is an image of a tree, floating across the sea on a platform. This moment actually happened — thousands watched it live on an internet stream. Behind it stands Georgian oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili, who dreamed of a paradise garden filled with magical, old trees. To realize this, he bought up trees from across the country — tearing them out by the roots and relocating them to his private estate. The film consists of many static scenes: we watch people hidden in machines digging, drilling, tearing up the ground. These are unmistakably images from the heart of the Anthropocene — actions of an oligarch who becomes a godlike creator. In the place of old trees, roads are to be built - the landscape becomes a corridor to a goal. At the same time, these uprooted roots hold the memory of families and homes. In the documentary, we meet people who, pushed to sell their homes, lose the living images of their own memory. Ivanishvili becomes a figure that tells a broader story about the reality of late capitalism, while also embodying something deeply specific about today’s Georgian political reality. In the post-screening discussion, Jashi told us that the film began with that image of a drifting tree — and the ambivalent emotions it stirred: beauty mixed with a sense that something was wrong, a glitch in reality. In the flow of thoughts over these past days, Tadeusz Sławek’s raft returns — a sign of hope for another kind of community, but also a symbol of the loneliness within the refugee condition. And this glitch, again, brings us back to Hańderek’s tree — now overgrown with barbed ivy. It is fascinating how all these images generate truth out of conflicting dimensions — especially considering that Jashi’s film went underground after being accused of lies.