The Land of Soul

The Land of Soul looks at the life in the mountain mining villages of the Tkuarchal region of Abkhazia, once thriving, but never fully recovered after the siege during the 1992-1993 Georgian-Abkhaz war. This is an exploration of the post-war trauma, a search for the traces of war imprinted in people’s bodies and in the façades of the surviving buildings. The images of the semi-deserted places become a metaphor for the country itself: Abkhazia still remains a ghost state on the world map. Its autonomy is recognized by a handful of countries. The trauma of war, the search for the identity during the post-Soviet era, the complex relations between nature and urban spaces — all this continues to define its current context. Longing for a lost past and an uncertain future is correlated here with the painstaking work to maintain a space for life among the ruins. The traces of war permeate it and the subtropical forest seeks to completely absorb it, but as long as people for various reasons have not left their homes, it will be something more than just a spot on the map, frozen in tension of the conflict which is stopped but not resolved.