I Pity the Garden, 2022
VR experience for Meta Quest
I Pity the Garden by Tbilisi-based artist duo Mariam Natroshvili and Detu Jincharadze is an immersive artwork about the premonition of the end. Through VR experience, the viewer is led into a realm of magical realism within the Anthropocene Epoch.
For Natroshvili and Jincharadze, artists born a few years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the feeling of the end has always been integral to their experience of everyday life and has existed as a cornerstone of their collective memory. Living within the volatile environment of the so called developing country means to exist with the constant anticipation of various kinds of endings. This end does not necessarily mean disappearance; it can also embrace the beginning of something different in itself. However, the drama of how events unfold too often resembles a dystopian reality or a horrific fairytale where the metaphorical garden dries out, dies, is set ablaze, and is ultimately rendered empty.
I Pity the Garden takes the viewer into an immersive environment modeled by the mythopoetic forms of the artist’s narrative. It’s an observation on the signs marking the end: a horizon on fire, an abandoned city, a barking dog chained to a wall made of words, a vacant office cracking, a place where supermarket shelves are taken over by a horde of insects. The central scene of the VR experience is a garden of extinct plants – The Ghosts Garden. This ecological crisis, in real life and represented here in VR, is one of the signs of the end. This virtual garden unites plants that have become extinct as a result of human intervention.
The work presents non-linear storytelling of the Anthropocene era garden. The setting is similar to an abandoned video game where no human is visible. Only traces, irreversible mistakes, and wounds in the earth can be seen. It is a poetic work that employs the technological age’s language to speak about the end and the beginning.
Duration: 20 min.
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VIDEO LINK
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Mariam Natroshvili is an artist based in Tbilisi, Georgia. She is working in collaboration with Detu Jincharadze. Their practice includes multimedia and interdisciplinary projects. Focusing on themes such as disappearance and oblivion, they look for the traces of personal or collective memory, stories of people and places faded away or transformed as the results of significant socio-political or ecological events. The key medium of the artists are words, texts, video and CGI. The duo has participated in many international and local exhibitions, including “Houston, we have a problem” - Artisterium VII; “Buildings are not enough” - Tbilisi Architecture Biennale; IDFA doclab, and other projects. Mariam Natroshvili and Detu Jincharadze have represented Georgia at the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale Di Venezia with an immersive artwork I Pity the Garden comprising large-scale video installation and VR experience.
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