The Mountain Speaks to the Sea delves into the experimental film trilogy by Georgian artist and filmmaker Tekla Aslanishvili which investigates regimes of infrastructural governance by examining how ports, railways and smart city projects act as technologies of citizenship and sovereignty. Images of distant geographies are connected with future orientations, revealing the disruptive impacts of large-scale energy and transportation projects on the ecologies of the South Caucasus.
By zooming in and out on the grand narratives of infrastructural development, it assembles fragmented (hi)stories of people who live and work around sites of transit and extraction, sabotaging their material systems to challenge violent practices of statecraft.
Positioned between an artist’s book and a reader, The Mountain Speaks to the Sea features contributions from writers and academics in visual culture, political science and critical geography, and experiments with ways of translating film into printed matter. The book is edited by Tekla Aslanishvili and Silvia Franceschini, with contributions by Alexandra Aroshvili, Ifor Duncan, Silvia Franceschini, Evelina Gambino, and Timothy Mitchell.
Onomatopee, 344pp, 11cm x 18cm, illustrated paperback, 2025