Dates: 6th to 11th November 2017

Venues: IDS, Building 8, GTU, 75 Kostava Street, Tbilisi, and Rustaveli Theatre on 17, Rustaveli Avenue, Tbilisi

Event: Ethnographic Journey through Urban Tbilisi/Documentary Filmmaking

Format: Joint Workshop between IDS and MARCH (Moscow Architecture School) / British Higher School of Art and Design in Moscow

Instructors: Joseph Van der Steen, and James O'Brien, Architects (UK)

Poster © Joseph Van der Steen    Photo © James O'Brien

The ethnography of a city is derived from it’s human, historic, climatic and physical culture. Using the City Symphony films of the 1920’s (such as Man with a Movie Camera, dir. Dziga Vertov, 1929) as a reference, the workshop, initiated by the instructors of the two British design schools in Moscow, intended to record, analyse and present the relationship between architecture, the city and it’s inhabitants and how the film camera can be used as a tool for objective research rather than a romanticised narrative.

The workshop was interested in the integration of ethnographic research into the architectural discourse. It became a big success attracting almost 60 students from different countries: 16 of them from the two British design schools of Moscow, similar number of students from other architectural programs in Tbilisi, and twice as much from the IDS. They were split into 15 mixed groups of up to 4 people and, since the launch of the workshop, for the next 4 days invaded the city with their mobile phones or video cameras. 

Through a detailed and humane understanding of a place and it’s people, their history and culture, the workshop had focused on understanding, recording and, on 11 November, finally presenting a series of 5 minute documentary films stitched together as a mosaic representation of urban life, and the ethnography of Tbilisi. Through documentation using film and hand drawn site survey plans, the relationship between architecture and people, space and place has been explored, and how the method of objective looking and study can help shape the manner in which we think about, and eventually design in, an urban context that is sensitive and responsive to human habits, has been demonstrated. The venue for the final presentation of the film was the famous basement café of Rustaveli Theatre, the place where almost a century earlier the Georgian artistic avant-garde found its space for cultural arguments and discussions and where they had left their eternal mark in the form of wall paintings.