Tagveti – un village en Géorgie

Natela Grigalashvili spent most of her childhood in the village of Tagveti, where she lived with her parents and brother. The village inspired her to create two photographic studies. The first depicts her relationship with her mother and demonstrates her love for her (and her hope that her work will please her). The second – Tagveti, the “Village of Mice” – underlines the attachment Natela feels to the place where she grew up. Over time, the boundaries between these two studies have blurred and they now coexist in the same space – they speak of her life, her past, her memory and the memories of the villagers.

Living in Tbilisi, Natela Grigalashvili makes the most of her rare return visits to Tagveti, usually during the summer, to photograph the village and the people she misses who still live there. She seeks to immortalise the place and maintain a record of a rural way of life which she sees as heading towards extinction. She began this work with only a basic camera and out of date film, yet these elements combine to give her work a powerful evocative force, making it a rare testimony to this point in time.