On the 6th of September, at 4 PM, at “Arlekinas” (Bangų g. 5A), as a part of the 1st Klaipėda Biennial, there will be a screening of Tekla Aslanishvili film The Mountain Speaks to the Sea, 2024.
Tekla Aslanishvili explores infrastructure projects – ports, railways, and ‘smart’ cities – as technologies of citizenship and sovereignty, and examines the relationships people have with them. The Mountain Speaks to the Sea is a film trilogy that presents the costs and impact of infrastructure in the South Caucasus region – from the mountains to the Black Sea – including the EU initiative to lay a high-voltage cable beneath the Black Sea.
In Aslanishvili’s work, infrastructure becomes a medium for reflecting not only on technological processes but also industrial ruptures and the shifting distribution of power between governments, communities, and natural landscapes. Special attention is given to the south-western region of Georgia, where unregulated cryptocurrency mining is destabilising energy systems and social relations, and dams are disrupting the ecological balance. These structures expose contested, often invisible realities that emerge alongside the reshaping of land-based infrastructure.
In this work, the link between infrastructure and landscape directly echoes broader ecological and identity issues central to maritime transit.
Tekla Aslanishvili (b. 1988) is an essayist and filmmaker working between Berlin, Vienna, and Tbilisi. Her work has been exhibited internationally in museums and art festivals, including M HKA in Antwerp, Transmediale in Berlin, SculptureCenter in New York, the Taipei Biennial, and the Baltic Triennial in Vilnius. She is currently a fellow at IFK, a PhD candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, and a member of the Graduate School at the Berlin University of the Arts.
Photo: Tekla Aslanishvili.
September 6
4:00–5:00 PM – Film screening
5:00–5:45 PM – Talk with the artist
Cinema “Arlekinas” (Bangų g. 5A, Klaipėda)
