Paper Short Abstract:

Focusing on the Georgian Parliament building in Tbilisi, this paper aims to demonstrate how memories of political violence can be embedded in the built environment and reconstructed using participant-produced site drawings as a methodological tool.

Paper Abstract:

For 35 years, the area around the Georgian parliament building in Tbilisi has been a designated site for political mobilisations. Anti-Soviet demonstrations resulting in military tanks killing dozens in 1989, the civil war of 1992 and dozens of later cases of police brutality are now remembered through this area. The site is formed into the “lieu de memoir” (Nora, 1989), where traumatic and triumphant memories coexist, shaping ambivalent “affective geography”(Navaro-Yashin, 2012). This paper proposes participant-produced site drawings as a methodological tool that grasps traumatic affects and collective memories of political violence embedded in the materiality of the built form.

Based on already conducted research, the paper demonstrates how participatory drawings can be positioned as a methodological reflection of the theoretical “both-and”(Navaro-Yashin, 2012) approach, merging subject-oriented perspectives on affect with object-oriented theories (Thrift, 2007). Through subject-centred approaches, drawings become a “site of experimentation”(Ingold, 2021) where participants, as agents, “construct a reality” (Ssorin-Chaikov, 2013) and engage in “boundary making”, “choosing what to include in their images and what to omit”(Antona, 2019). Through object-centred approaches, drawings can be viewed not only as mere representations of the site but as actants (Latour, 2005) or “representations-in-relation” that “incite, move, anger, transform, delight, enchant or otherwise affect” (Anderson, 2019). In both cases, through the proposed method, architecture is not seen as a "static object" (Yaneva & Latour, 2012) but as “an ongoing process of holding together” (Jacobs & Merriman, 2011) that emerges into the archive of past political violence and brutality.