Tbilisi Guide

A narrative city guide tracing Tbilisi’s past through everyday spaces.

The Tbilisi Guide is a story-driven spatial artwork and digital handbook that explores Georgia’s social transformation through the buildings, streets, and everyday spaces of Tbilisi.

Rather than describing architectural styles or landmarks, the guide connects specific locations to the histories that unfolded around them. Each place becomes a reference point for understanding how social and political changes shaped the city’s present form. Buildings are approached not as objects to be observed, but as traces of past functions, overlooked narratives, and lived realities.

The guide can be experienced anywhere in the world. However, its intended form unfolds while walking through the city itself. As you move through Tbilisi, audio pieces introduce each location. Streets, buildings, and public spaces become part of the artwork - the city turns into the interface. Listening and walking merge into a single experience.

This is not a tourist guide. The focus lies beyond familiar landmarks and postcard views, turning instead to places embedded in everyday urban life. These are spaces where real transformations left their marks - places that quietly reflect how Tbilisi became what it is today.

The narrative centers on the Soviet and post-Soviet eras. To understand the present, the guide returns to the outlines drawn during Soviet times and traces how they shifted in independent Georgia. Each site tells a fragment of a larger story, revealing continuities, ruptures, and unresolved layers of the past.

The storytelling takes the form of a subjective montage: a collage of historical events, old newspaper materials, memories, and personal perspectives. Different layers of time coexist, allowing the past to be sensed alongside the present moment.