Authors

Eleni Sideri¹;  ¹ University of Macedonia, Greece

Discussion

In the 1990s, the geopolitical changes in the European eastern borderlands introduced the idea of transition which disrupted the world order as it was established since the Cold War stability. A new take to the emerging global condition, globalization, exemplified disjuncture, disruption, deterritorialization and mobility as the new normal. In the last decades, polycrises, financial, humanitarian, environmental, have further solidified disruption not as a paradox but as part of the capitalist idea of life. During these decades, the study of the Caucasus has changed from an often essentialist repertoire of Cold War and Orientalist stereotypes regarding ethnic tensions, conflicts, and violence to a more historicized, culturally sensitive, and interconnected approaches which take into account geometries of power and post-colonial legacies. My paper draws from this shift by putting in the centre of the research the life and work of three generations of female filmmakers in Georgia, the Gogoberidze family. I will examine by using multimodal methods (texts, oral testimonies, films) how exile and stigmatization that led the matriarch of the family, Nutsa Gogoberidze to the cinematic oblivion in the 1930s turned to inspiration and creativity for her daughter in the 1970s, and struggle and resistance for her granddaughter, Salome Alexi, in the 2020s. How did troubled and forbidden memories travel in different generations? How does shifting the attention to disruption and mobility of memories help us as ethnographers reconsider our ideas of archive? How does multimodal ethnography give us the opportunity to consider the silences, disruptions and invisibility generating more inclusive archives?