DEZERTERS BAZAAR SOUNDWALK (2014)
In November 2014, I was invited as artist in residence at GeoAIR in Tbilisi, Georgia. My residency was part of a larger GeoAir project, called Cooking Imaginations: Tbilisi Migrant Stories. I researched the market as a public space where many cultural identities expressed through food meet. During my residency, I created an interactive sound walk through the Dezerters Bazaar, the largest market in Tbilisi. To create this sound walk, I interviewed new migrants from a diverse range of origins while they were shopping on the market. Stories emerged of nostalgia, transmitted family recipes and culinary transitions, and adaptations of recipes based on the availability of ingredients in Georgia. Simultaneously, I got to know a lot of the market vendors, because I was there everyday, and I started recognizing reoccurring patterns and exchanges in the everyday life of the market. This resulted in a sound walk that guides the individual audience members through the market, weaving together the different routes of the people I had walked with, following in their footsteps throughout the space.
The sound walk was launched in both Georgian and English at the end of my residency and is still available for download online – anyone can walk it at his or her own convenience. This was the first theatrical sound walk to be developed and presented in Georgia.