In April, 2014 Soviet Past Research Laboratory (SovLab) with financial support of the Heinrich Boell Foundation South Caucasus Regional Office has started implementation of the project "XX century Georgia in twenty snapshots".
The goal of the project is to support rethinking social attitudes of the XX century and current perceptions of modern history in Georgia. Thus it is envisaged to undertake activities that will stimulate reflection on importance of those historic events, which positively or negatively affected social development and are mostly forgotten. The project aims to link certain urban spaces of Tbilisi with the happenings / events that took place in the same places in past (XX century). This will allow making past and present emotionally bounded in minds of current dwellers of the city. Thus the project will stimulate reflection on influence of historical events on nowadays reality and focus on need how to deal with memorizing non-physical traces of history (events/happenings) of XX century in public spaces which are characterized with quite a different emotional-symbolic meaning than in the past (e.g. Erevanski-Freedom-Zakfederacia-Beria-Lenin-Freedom square; Golovin-Rustaveli ave.; Alexander Nevskii cathedral – Supreme Council – Parliament building; etc.).
Achieving these objectives is envisaged by production of 20 double-layer photos, which depicts crucial events in XX century Georgia’s history and are linked with specific place in Tbilisi. Thus these photos show transformation, or contrariwise - sustainability of emotional-symbolic meaning of the concrete public space in linkage with the historic event. Each photo will be accompanied by relevant informative and analytic explanation. Since research is finalized the outcome of the project will be to organize the exhibition and a discussion.