Inspired by Donna Haraway and John Berger’s contemporary theories on interspecies relations, Andro Eradze fills the frames of his works with plants and animals poised to exceed their boundaries. His camera follows scenes on the cusp of something undefined: a smouldering campfire, a stormy forest of wind-whipped trees, a flooding football pitch. Accompanied by haunting, transcendent soundtracks, his films feel like a compilation of the transitional moments of a feature film, leaving the viewer with a sense of expansive anticipation. Raised in the dust (2022),stems from the conclusion of classical Georgian poet Vazha-Pshavela’s The Snake Eater (1901). The poem’s protagonist has a supernatural talent for understanding the language of nature; he must decide between his connection to nature and his social responsibilities, ultimately bowing to the latter. Eradze’s film takes place in a forest. Taxidermized animals appear one by one, disturbed by an uproar of New Year’s Eve fireworks. Critical of the human carnival that is disruptive, toxic, and fatal for wildlife, Eradze’s film repositions fireworks as an entry point onto the dark and mythological side of the forest, a world of plants, animals, and phantoms.
Screening dates:
Andro Eradze, Raised in the dust, 2022, 4K video, 8:12 min. Commissioned by La Biennale di Venezia; courtesy the artist and SpazioA Gallery.
24 June–19 July 2024
© the artist
About the artist:
Andro Eradze (Born 1993, Georgia) lives and works in Tbilisi, Georgia. His works meditate on the qualitative nature of images, still as well as moving. He studied at the Shota Rustaveli Film Academy, as well as CCA-T (Center of Contemporary Art Tbilisi) MFA program. Working primarily in Georgia, Eradze experiments with introducing narratives to the outskirts of human habitation, in the literal and figurative sense. The feeling of an uncanny, non-anthropocentric presence in his works invites the viewer to the liminal space among the subjective and the visceral, between cognition, perception and the alien otherness of non-human experience. Animals, objects, plants, and digital artifacts permeate a sense of presence in a landscape that exists simultaneously parallel and entangled human experience. Eradze’s practice investigates the potentiality of animism as method. Photography, installations, experimental cinema practices and video blend into a project contemplating the fading present, in which the Anthropocene is faltering, and everything operates independently of it. Building upon the legacy of alternative approaches to reality – surrealism and magical realism – his images blur the distinction between the imaginary and the real.
He has taken part in several international solo, group exhibitions and screenings including: The 59th Venice Biennale The Milk of Dreams, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice (IT); The New Museum Screen Series, New Museum, New York (USA); WIELS Contemporary Art Center, Brussels (BE); The Parliament of Mamonts Biennale Gherdeina 9, Val Gardena (IT); Memory is an Editing Station, 22nd Biennial Sesc_Videobrasil, Sao Paulo (BR); Long-distance Friendships, 14th Kaunas Biennial, Lithuania (LT); Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin at HKW, Berlin (DE); Between Dog and Wolf, Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles, (FR); We Are They: Glitch Ecology and the Thickness of Now, Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles, (USA); Long Live the Night, SpazioA, Pistoia (IT); Everything Happened so Much, Film Festival Oberhausen (DE); Buildings Are Not Enough, Tbilisi Architectural Biennial, Tbilisi, (GE).
