Tekla Aslanishvili
© Tekla Aslanishvili
Tekla Aslanishvili makes experimental documentaries that focus on transport, trade and extraction infrastructures, and their connection to politics and geopolitical developments. A State in a State is the outcome of her research made together with specialists from various disciplines into the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway — a trading ‘corridor’ as part of Turkey’s ambitious Middle Corridor initiative linking Central Asia with Turkey. The railway was established as a result of the first Nagorno-Karabakh war in 1993, and its aim was to isolate Armenia by building a railway connection between Azerbaijan and Turkey, via Georgia.
A State in a State examines railways as the technical materialisation of fragile political borders that have re-emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Revolving around scenes of waiting and delay that constitute cargo mobility, the film reads the optimistic narratives about the New Silk Road against the grain. It observes how the iron foundation of connectivity can be used as a weapon of exclusion and geopolitical sabotage. Along the same lines, other forms of sabotage are deployed by workers to disrupt the political violence. Looking at historic and current practices of resistance, A State in a State explores the potential of railroads for building a different, infrastructural consciousness and the lasting, transnational kinship among the people who live and work around them.
“What is happening with this re-routing of the railway is a form of political sabotage between nation states! And in many ways it’s a multi-layered sabotage, as firstly it sabotages one country’s potential for economic thriving, but it also sabotages this connectivity that existed between those who worked and travelled on these railways”.
A State in a State, 2022
Single-channel video, 47 min.
Courtesy the artist. Collection M HKA