of the audience
Then, we pass through a door made in paper, our body destroys it
and we penetrate, into a dry garden made of snails and branches.
A young woman is on the floor, sporadically sketching with dusty
black charcoal. Her hands are full of dust, her hair is entangled.She
is afraid and alone in her world of childwood, in the crackling
sounds of sand and shells.
But softness is yet to come. Through a thousand layers of cotton
and silk, satin and flowery curtains, someone wants to tell you
about her grandmother, how she was laughing and running
around in her kitsch silk dress, how safe you felt spending the
summers in her house in Iran. The time is for teacups and rose-
scented biscuits, sour memories and sweet incense.
And madness. And erotic release. Here you can allow yourself to sit
down into the intimate forest of a women. In a room of hair, from
the ceiling to the floor, a creature from your strangest dreams is
standing; she is covered in hair that drips down her bare chest, her
knees, onto the carpet. The manes and curls are undulating slowly,
exuding a strange perfume, turning the gears of an anachronistic
music box and singing sensual opera airs of Debussy. This
immense warm vagina full of hair is bleeding with pomegranates,
and suffering with pieces of mirrors. The perfume reminds you a
specific scene of La Curée by Emile Zola, where the heroine, Renée
is suffocating in a glasshouse of tropical plants.
Later on, bourgeois depression takes over. Standing in a glitzy
strass dress, a skinny French woman mumbles an outdated tune in
a pink microphone; her friend, crouched on the floor, chain
smokes cigarettes and eats prescription pills. It's the show of a
desperate, modern women, locked in their own heads, locked in
their own society.
In contrast, an island of quiet neighbours the drama; through a
small window, one can peep at a painter, in her Own Room. She is
surrounded by pages torn from the local newspapers, posters
taken from the subway corridors, flyers of all kinds, and she has
spoken with many female painters on the markets in Tbilisi. But
she paints a common bouquet of pink flowers on a blue
background, as a tribute to this poor women who lives around our
exhibition.
At the end of this corridor, the final room awaits. Guests are invited
to come through the windows, into the room of softness, of
healing, of reparation. From the traumas and the shock, the pain
and the misery, the solitude and the memories, there is relief in
togetherness. We sit down, on a thick layer of fuzzy white wool.
"Finally, you can relax", says the guide, "and close your eyes". We
sink in an ocean of sounds, and in the red darkness of the room,
two performers carry orbs of sound in their hand. Small, vibrational
speakers, floating around the bodies of the audience, massaging
their nervous systems, calling for the spirits inside to come out, to
surface on the skin, and let go.
A final trance, a final collective vocal performance, with an archaic
song from Laz, forgotten people of Georgia, and the journey is
done. Propulsed back out onto the streets of Tbilisi, guests have
been digested, pulled in different directions, disturbed, caressed
and embraced. They have taken a deep trip into the Enclosed
Garden, and they will never be the same.
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