Tekla Aslanishvili: The Mountain Speaks to the Sea

The Mountain Speaks to the Sea. Mapping New Energy Geographies

The multimedia lecture-performance interlaces text with excerpts from the author’s experimental documentary and archival photo, phono, and film materials to trace shifting sociotechnical orders surrounding infrastructures of energy production and transit in the South Caucasus. The starting point is the joint EU-Georgia initiative to construct the world’s longest high-voltage power grid beneath the Black Sea, transmitting renewable energy from hydropower and other sources across the Caucasus and Caspian regions to Romania and Hungary. Aimed at reducing dependence on Russia for global data and energy transmission, this project has revived hydroelectric developments previously halted due to local protests during and after Soviet rule. Using this moment of anticipated transformation, the lecture reassembles fragmented histories of scientific and cultural knowledge production, extra-territorial governance and infrastructural disobedience. Concluding in the extractive landscapes of water-rich Upper Svaneti in Georgia, it examines how the historic expansion of hydropower feeds the proliferation of cryptocurrency mining today—eroding local economies and the social and ecological fabric long woven around the region’s rivers.