From landslide-hit villages to decaying Soviet architecture, TAB 2026 shows how emptiness is ‘historically produced and politically managed’.
Perched on a rocky ridge in Khevsureti, in Georgia’s northeastern highlands, the medieval fortified village of Mutso has been structurally restored, its buildings preserved and re-roofed. By most professional measures, the project was a success.
‘The rehabilitation of Mutso was done more or less well’, architect and researcher Nana Meparishvili said during her talk at the 2026 Tbilisi Architecture Biennial’s symposium. The work was recognised and won prizes, she noted, ‘but today, when we go there, the place resembles a museum, because it is not full of life’.
For Meparishvili, who has spent more than two decades studying Georgia’s traditional dwellings, this is the problem. A monument is too often considered saved once its restoration follows every academic rule, she argued, while people who once gave it purpose remain absent.
‘Preserving a monument means preserving the life within it’, she said.
Her argument ran through much of the biennial: a building can stand intact and still be empty.
Held from 25 September to 3 October in Open Space, a Tbilisi-based centre for visual and performing arts, the biennial brought together exhibitions, talks, workshops, and a two-day symposium, all under the title ‘The Geography of Emptiness’. Its curatorial statement traced the emptying of the post-socialist world to the collapse of Soviet-era industry and collective farms, labour migration, war, and ecological disaster. It also pointed to newer causes: cities where apartments are built and sold as financial assets rather than homes.
Tinatin Gurgenidze, the biennial’s co-founder and curator, tells OC Media the theme grew out of its previous edition in 2024, which focused on climate, human intervention, and extractivism. The Kharagauli landslide and the deadly landslide in Shovi pushed the organisers further, with Gurgenidze noting that in such cases, what is left is ‘not just physical emptiness, but emptiness of every dimension.’
The symposium’s eight sessions ranged from examining darbazi houses in Samtskhe-Javakheti and the oda houses of western Georgia to tracing the lives of scrap-metal collectors in the ruins of Poti’s Soviet-era factories and shipyards. Other sessions looked at the transformation of Tbilisi’s Saburtalo district, the disappearance of traditional neighbourhoods in Yerevan, and the contested legacy of Berlin’s Palast der Republik.
Alongside Georgian participants, speakers and exhibitors came from Armenia, Austria, Germany, Latvia, Ukraine, and beyond. Institutions involved in this year’s edition included the Goethe-Institut, Politecnico di Milano, and the European architecture platform LINA.
Founded in 2017, the biennial is an independent initiative run by just a handful of people. Much of the work, Gurgenidze says, is done without any resources at all. Yet this year’s edition was one of the most visited yet: ‘It turned out to be an event on a scale we hadn’t had in previous years’.
When restoration isn’t enough
Meparishvili’s team drew up a rehabilitation project for Mutso in 2008. Even then, she tells OC Media, they asked for a development plan as well, because a monument needs management.
The National Agency for Cultural Heritage Preservation of Georgia later granted Mutso the status of a museum-reserve, which Meparishvili says creates a defined, clear, if slightly narrow function. Yet such a status requires visitors to buy a ticket and only enter the complex during set hours; even that requires hosts or guides, she said, and those are not yet in place.
At the same time, she said, it is too expensive for the state to run a whole village as an ethnographic museum from Tbilisi, especially when most locals no longer stay through the winter.
The real task, in her view, is bringing residents back because they see a reason to return, not simply to care for a monument.
‘They must have an incentive, a goal, and they must see their future in this environment’, she said in her talk.
Meparishvili believes there is a demand for this return, pointing to a rise in permits for private houses on the outskirts of Tbilisi after the COVID-19 pandemic as a sign that people are starting to move from cities to villages, where examples of vernacular architecture still survive.
This experience now shapes her work in Khakhabo, another Khevsureti village that cannot be reached by car, where her team began rehabilitation in 2025.
She argues that restoring any buildings is pointless without first deciding what they will be used for: ‘It simply makes no sense. In 10 years, 15 years, it would need to be redone’.
Heritage itself, she argued, can give people a reason to stay. Tourists come precisely to see it, so preserving it can become ‘an organic part of [residents’] life’, serving both their income and their sense of identity.
Khakhabo already has one example. Paata Khakhiauri, one of the few residents who never left, runs a family guesthouse with his wife, keeps cattle and horses, and leads horseback tours from Ardoti and Datvisjvari. Everything he earns, Meparishvili tells OC Media, comes from tourism.
She also sees a strong pull back to ancestral homes. Even Georgians who emigrate, she said, return for the feast days of the villages their families come from. ‘Whatever other house we have, home is still one’, she said
Heritage, Meparishvili argues, should not be treated as something frozen or preserved in a jar. Tradition is alive, and it develops: ‘Heritage must not be empty. Heritage must be full, and it must be full of life’.
Where emptiness is made
Where Meparishvili looked at buildings that outlived their residents, other participants examined what drives people out in the first place, from landslides to courts and state neglect. Among them was Mariami Maghlakelidze, the author of the exhibition piece ‘Geographies of Lithospheric Rupture’, who lives outside Georgia and first heard about the 2025 Kharagauli landslide through local media. She had been thinking about it ever since, she tells OC Media, and when the biennial announced its theme, she decided to return to Georgia to walk and scan the affected area.
‘The situation is more dramatic than I had imagined’, she says.
Her resulting exhibition piece treats the landslide not as a single event but as an ongoing process. The project links that process to the expansion of the highway and the modernisation of the railway through the region. Her footage also records plants, small animals, and birds, which, Maghlakelidze emphasises, were also victims of the same upheaval.
In one emptied village, she heard a dog bark and found a woman who had come back a year after everyone left.
‘Everything around is completely ruptured, but her house stands without a single crack’, Maghlakelidze says.
The ground in front of and behind the house had risen and sunk, but the woman’s vine was untouched.
‘For me, this woman is hope and love for the environment’, she says.
Another talk focused on the southern Georgian village of Tsalka, where emptiness is kept in place by people rather than geology.
Nana Kobidze, a PhD candidate at Central European University (CEU), has spent five years researching the families resettled in Tsalka from highland Adjara after landslides destroyed their homes and farmland in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Speaking during a panel at the symposium, Kobidze explained that the government placed the families in houses left empty by Tsalka’s Greek community, many of whom emigrated to Greece after the Soviet collapse. Georgian officials promised the refugees that they would buy the Greek houses and transfer them to the resettled people, yet, according to Kobidze, those promises were never kept. When some Greek owners returned, they went to court, leading to evictions. Families were left moving from one empty house to another.
The result, she said, is two realities side by side: abandoned houses that nobody uses, and people who urgently need housing and land. When she returned in summer 2025 to photograph unfinished Soviet-era buildings, two police officers stopped her. They told her the site had been transferred to the state and that there were no plans for it.
What interested her here, she said, was ‘how emptiness is maintained [...] through the power of police and the court system’. The families, she added, are left with ‘a bitter feeling and the feeling of injustice’.
Lika Jalaghania, a PhD candidate in anthropology at Ilia State University (ISU), draws the same line between emptiness and emptying.
‘Emptying is a practice [...] it is some kind of active process, which is not a state, unlike emptiness’, she tells OC Media.
Across the regions she has visited, Jalaghania says, residents often speak of ‘forced emptying’. In the Rioni Valley, for example, locals pointed to the resistance that had emerged there and told her the state stood to benefit from the villages being emptied. They linked this to the lack of infrastructure being provided by the state, including a road, thereby making it harder for people to move and providing more incentive for people to resettle. Jalaghania argues that by withholding infrastructure and investment, the state maintains the emptiness the 1990s left behind.
In poorer highland villages, she sees neglect combined with dependence on social assistance. Residents in one region told her that if inspectors saw five chickens in a yard, the family would lose its benefits.
‘The state helps you so as to keep you in poverty’, she says.
Emptiness in every dimension
Beyond the symposium, Open Space brought together 34 exhibitions, placed throughout four floors. Their subjects ranged from an unfinished third line of the Tbilisi Metro to earthen architecture and repair practices in a village in Guria.
In one room, rows of photographs showed disused factories, culture houses, and swimming pools. Visitors could locate each one by matching numbers on a set of municipal maps, which Salome Tabatadze, a member of the Industrial Heritage Research Group, describes to OC Media as ‘a little adventure-rebus’.
The exhibition piece, ‘Post-Functional Emptiness’, draws on a dataset of 1,390 disused buildings across 35 municipalities and 10 regions of Georgia. The data was gathered under Physical Mapping, an initiative of Creative Compass Georgia, an EU-funded project co-funded by the Goethe-Institut. Tabatadze points out that the wall shows perhaps 30% of what actually exists.
In Soviet times, every settlement needed a workplace, she explains, and factories were built where raw materials, such as timber, stone, or sand, were easy to extract and transport. Understanding those original systems, she argues, is the first step to adapting the buildings for today.
‘The main idea [of the project is] how much wealth has been abandoned’, Tabatadze says.
Villagers, she notes, are ready to take part in reviving such spaces, including with physical labour, if they can see real results for their children. Young people need space for learning outside school. Adults need somewhere to meet neighbours after a long working day, ‘not on a street corner, on a plank laid across blocks somewhere in a back alley’.
For some architects, the question of what is lost has also become a question about their own profession. Tio Gabunia, an architect and co-founder of the Professional Union of Georgian Architects and Urbanists, tells OC Media that the union’s public launch coincided with this year’s biennial, which he sees as one of the main events bringing architects together.
The union took shape after Tbilisi City Hall employees signed a petition in response to Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze’s 28 November 2024 announcement suspending Georgia’s EU accession talks. Gabunia said he was among the signatories, who then entered a collective dispute with City Hall, leading to some later losing their jobs.
The union was set up behind the scenes, Gabunia says, because when an organisation is openly seen as adversarial, the bureaucracy becomes far harder. Its founders first had to put everything in order legally and complete the procedures mandatory for forming a professional union. Only after that could they present their manifesto, which they did at the biennial alongside an installation that collected visitors’ views for future research.
The theme of emptiness, Gabunia says, touches the profession beyond the union’s specific concerns: ‘what kinds of spaces we create and what kinds of spaces we lose’.
The biennial itself works under similar pressures. Gurgenidze tells OC Media that the biennial received support from the EU’s Creative Europe programme after its first edition, but did not secure the funding this year. That was not, she stresses, because of the restrictive laws Georgia has passed since 2024. Still, the volume of new legislation had become hard to navigate.
‘I can no longer quite figure it out; there are so many laws already’.
The biennial has never charged an entrance fee, which makes sponsors hard to find.
‘A development company won’t fund us, because we talk about topics that go against [their work]’, she says.
Across borders
The questions the biennial raised are not unique to Georgia. Shant Charoian, a Yerevan-based architect and creative director of the LINE Armenian Architecture Biennial, tells OC Media the curatorial text was highly relevant to Armenia, where ‘we’re having the same construction boom of empty apartments’.
Charoian also co-directs the Oshakan Project, a summer school that brings students from abroad to document heritage in a village in Armenia’s Aragatsotn province. Outsiders taking photographs and drawing plans, he says, changes how residents see their own surroundings.
‘When you see your buildings in the same way every day, you don’t realise that [...] maybe it’s actually very special.’
At a discussion during the biennial with Gurgenidze and Jesse Vogler, professor and head of the architecture program at the Free University of Tbilisi, Charoian said his own biennial, now preparing its second edition, had deliberately chosen to work outside the capital because ‘everything’s always about Yerevan’. The next edition will be located almost four hours’ drive away, he said, which costs the team heavily in both money and time.
He also noted that while Georgia and Armenia are geographically ‘so close, [...] the cultural initiatives are so not connected somehow’, adding that. ‘Maybe these projects need to be initiated among ourselves’.
In turn, Vogler noted that the darbazi, a house type found from central Anatolia to the Hindu Kush, had from the start been framed as transnational.
‘In some ways it’s this material critique of all of these national borders’, he said.
What the region lacks, in his view, is support for sustained research, without which much of the talent it produces can ‘stay on the table’.
Gurgenidze also highlighted that she would like the biennial to work outside Tbilisi more often, though she tells OC Media that some cross-border links already run through LINA. She notes that the biennial has worked for several years with the platform, which brings together around 40 museums, biennials, festivals, and universities. Each year it selects about 25 projects by emerging practitioners through an open call.
It was through that network that Jakob Travnik and Gordon Selbach, members of the Vienna-based Bioregional Assembly, planned a week of research on wine culture and architecture in Kakheti and gave a lecture on the closing day of the Biennial alongside Giorgi Kharitonashvili.
Speaking with OC Media, Travnik says that emptiness for him makes him think about rural places where it often comes down to ‘emptiness of imagination’. He further framed the question more practically.
‘How can you keep people there? How can you even create a reverse flux of people moving back?’ he questions, keeping the theme of the biennial at heart.
Witnesses to absence
Some of the exhibition pieces at Open Space dealt with absence more literally.
Darbazi Dialogues, curated by Gvantsa Modebadze and Nikoloz Tsagareishvili, centres on the gvirgvini, the corbelled wooden roof that crowns the darbazi house of Samtskhe-Javakheti. According to the project description, it marks the social and spiritual centre of the home. Most of the houses and roofs on display no longer stand, and the exhibition presents itself as witness to ‘an abstract landscape of absences’.
Many of the darbazi that survive were built as ceremonial or social spaces of the family home and are now ‘simply used as hay storage, or potato storage’, Vogler tells OC Media.
For him, the house type is also a pretext.
‘In some ways the darbazi is an alibi’, he says, explaining that it is a reason to go into the field, study places, meet people, and build connections in the regions.
Another exhibition titled ‘The Witnesses — Architectural Fictions of Spatial Occupation’, by a six-person team, addresses borderisation, the gradual advance of fences and markers along the borders of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Its ‘witnesses’ are built from materials of temporary military bases (corrugated metal sheets, sandbags, and barbed wire) and placed into everyday life, where they get in the way.
Two of these structures came to the biennial. One takes the place of a chair at a dining table and stands for people who disappeared from areas along the line. The other replaces a house key that no longer opens a door, because the home has been destroyed or someone else now lives in it.
‘In a way, this creates an anti-architectural mood’, Avtandil Margishvili, one of the project’s authors, tells OC Media. ‘Above all, these objects create discomfort for everyone they come to’.
That discomfort is necessary, he argues, because people carry on with their lives without thinking about how ‘the border creeps over little by little every night and we do nothing to stop it’. He warns that if the situation is forever ignored, one day the fence could reach your house.
‘I want everyone to feel the way the victims of borderisation feel’, he says.
Gurgenidze put the biennial’s purpose in similar terms, stressing the importance of seeing problems as shared. ‘If you have a home and someone else doesn’t, we should know that this is the case too’, she said.
At the start of the year, the organisers were not sure the biennial would take place at all. That it did, she said, came down to the solidarity of participants and visitors.
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Paid for by: Tbilisi Architecture Biennial