Tekla Aslanishvili

The Mountain Speaks to the Sea

Saturday, June 28th, 2025

16:00 – 19:00

We are pleased to invite you to the film screening of The Mountain Speaks to the Sea, 2024 and a book launch of the the accompanying publication released alongside Aslanishvili’s solo exhibition at Onomatopee. 

The screening and launch will be followed by a conversation between artist and filmmaker Tekla Aslanishvili and curator Silvia Franceschini, as well, as presentations by: Alexandra Aroshvili, Evelina Gambino and Ifor Duncan.

Positioned between an artist’s book and a reader, the publication experiments with ways of translating film into printed matter and situates the project's methodological approach within a broader geopolitical context. It features contributions by Alexandra Aroshvili, Ifor Duncan, Evelina Gambino, and Timothy Mitchell.

The film is a two-channel experimental documentary following the rivers of the South Caucasus from the mountains to the Black Sea. Navigating fragmented histories, myths and speculative futures around hydro energy infrastructures, it traces decades of socio-political and ecological change in the region. The narrative culminates in the EU-Georgia initiative to build the world's longest submarine cable aimed at reducing dependence on Russian fossil fuels and positioning Georgia as a major energy hub.

The talk follows a screening and offers insights into Aslanishvili’s inquiry into infrastructure, grounded in moving image and interdisciplinary collaboration.

1. Introduction - Tekla Aslanishvili’s Topographic Tales

Silvia Franceschini

Silvia Franceschini is a curator and writer working across the fields of visual arts, design, and architecture. She is the Curator of Contemporary at CIVA in Brussels, Associate Curator at Onomatopee in Eindhoven and co-founder of Celador, a space for art and writing in Brussels. Previously, she served as a Curator at Z33 — House for Contemporary Art, Design and Architecture in Hasselt, Belgium. Franceschini was a member of the curatorial team of The School of Kyiv — Kyiv Biennial 2015. Since 2009, she has been involved in the organization of exhibitions and public programs at various international institutions, including SALT, Istanbul; V–A–C Foundation, Moscow; the Moscow Biennale for Young Art; Futura — Center for Contemporary Art, Prague; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris.

1. Water Movement, Hybrid Ecosystems, and Infrastructural War - The Image as a Method

Alexandra Aroshvili

In the context of battles over resources and military, logistical, energy-related, and infrastructural wars - alongside the climate crisis and the ongoing green transition -we read the hydroelectric past and future of Georgia through Harun Farocki remarkable 1989 film Images of the World and the Inscription of War. Using the film's central method - the technical power of the image - the text connects scenes theauthor saw and experienced during the filming of Tekla Aslanishvili’s The MountainSpeaks to the Sea with both ancient and modern historical images and extractive logics, while also revealing the still-unstudied potential of natural and social forces,which erupt and collide with the complexities of military and industrial modern capitalism—just like waves crashing against the concrete barrier in Farocki’s film.

1. Rivers Shape Mountains — Mountains Become Rivers

Ifor Duncan

In the context of mega-scale hydropower, paying attention to the dynamic relationship between rivers and mountains offers the opportunity to disrupt the transformation of rivers into batteries of potential energy. When Sediment and alluvia, resulting from the continual interaction between river and mountain, are held back by expansive walls of concrete and earth, ecologies and economies begin to collapse both up and downstream. Sparked by Tekla Aslanishvili's experimental documentary The Mountain Speaks to the Sea (2024), I think about how the accumulation of sediments produces fissures in the physical and social grip hydropower exerts on rivers and communities.

1. Infrastructures of Friendship

Evelina Gambino

Research can be intimidating. Especially if what one researches is something simultaneously so broad and so intimate as people’s everyday lives in times of change. In my short contribution for the book, I reflect on the entanglements between friendship and research that have made up my collaboration with Tekla. From one project to the other, the stories we have sought to assemble are not smooth, instead they confront the seemingly endless cycles of emergence, failure and aftermath that organise the lives of the infrastructures we have been observing. We have focused our efforts towards staying with the troubles we have encountered along our way. But if we have kept working with one another from one infrastructure to the next is probably due to something simpler: the sheer pleasure of a friendship spawned through learning and producing knowledge together. 

Evelina Gambino is the Margaret Tyler Research Fellow in Geography at Girton College, University of Cambridge. Her research is concerned with a situated analysis of global logistics. Through ethnographic work around connectivity infrastructures in Georgia and the South Caucasus, Evelina’s research maps the ways in which planetary projects of circulation, such as the Belt and Road Initiative, are translated into local contexts. In dialogue with feminist critiques of capitalism, her analysis highlights the different kinds of work that this translation entails. Evelina’s work has been published within and beyond academia. She is currently completing a monograph that proposes a feminist, materialist approach to the study of infrastructural failure.