The Mountain Speaks to the Sea. Mapping New Energy Geographies
The project is grounded in non-fiction film as both a modality and a method for examining how energy infrastructures are utilized—in temporally and politically distant contexts—as technologies of cultural and scientific knowledge production, sovereignty, and resistance in the South Caucasus. Its entry point is the EU–Georgia plan to lay the world’s longest submarine cable under the Black Sea, aimed at reducing EU dependence on Russian fossil fuels, advancing a green energy transition, and positioning Georgia as an energy hub. This initiative has revived hydroelectric projects that were previously halted due to local protests during and after Soviet rule. The research traces the layered effects of this prospect, with a focus on the Samegrelo–Zemo Svaneti region in northwest Georgia, where unregulated crypto mining fractures energy systems and social relations, while dams disrupt ecological landscapes—revealing contested shadow realities that unfold alongside the infrastructural remaking of land.
Tekla Aslanishvili is an artist, filmmaker, and researcher. Her practice explores shifting fault lines between states, people, and their land through large-scale infrastructure projects. Using interdisciplinary collaborations and experimental documentary approaches, she binds together fragmented layers of politics, economy, technology, geology, and culture that underpin these logistics and energy infrastructures. She is currently a doctoral candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She earned a BA from the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts (2009) and an MA in Experimental Film and New Media from UdK Berlin (2015). Her work has been featured in international exhibitions, biennials, and publications. She was a 2024–2025 Graduate School fellow at the Berlin University of the Arts, a 2019 Digital Earth fellow, a 2021 Ars Viva nominee, and the recipient of the Han Nefkens Foundation – Fundació Antoni Tàpies Video Art Production Award (2020).
with Silvia Franceschini (eds.), The Mountain Speaks to the Sea, (= Onomatopee 261), Eindhoven 2025.
with Evelina Gambino and Ella Rowold Cavusoglu, »A State in a State«, in: Shah Ibrahim Ahmed and Ella Rowold Cavusoglu (eds.), Systems, (= Cambridge Journal of Visual Culture 3, 2024).
with Evelina Gambino, »Does the Future Ever Come? An Infrastructure and Its Multiple Delays«, in: Marius Babisa and Michaela Richter (eds.), Realities Left Vacant, Berlin 2024, n.b.k. Berlin Vol. 15: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König.
with Orit Halpern, »Scenes from a Reclamation«, in: Nick Axel (ed.), New Silk Roads, e-flux Architecture 2020.
Algorithmic Space and Its Social Implications, Luxembourg: Casino Luxembourg – Forum d’art contemporain 2017.