"I Pity the Garden" at the 59th Venice Biennale

For Natroshvili and Jincharadze, artists born a few years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the feeling of the end has always been integral to their everyday life and has existed as a cornerstone of their collective memory. Living within the volatile environment of the Global South means to exist with the constant anticipation of various kinds of endings. This end does not necessarily mean disappearance, it can also embrace the start of something new. However, the drama of how events unfold too often resembles a dystopian reality or a horrific fairytale, where the metaphorical garden dries out, dies, is set ablaze, and is ultimately rendered empty.

I Pity the Garden takes the viewer into a mesmeric environment modeled by the mythopoetic forms of the artists’ narrative. It’s an observation of signs marking the end: a horizon on fire, a deserted city, a barking dog chained to a wall made of words, a place where supermarket shelves are taken over by a horde of insects. The setting is similar to an abandoned video game where no human is visible and only the traces of irreversible mistakes and wounds in the earth can be seen. The central scene of the VR experience is the Ghosts Garden, a virtual garden that unites plants that have become extinct as a result of human intervention. This ecological crisis, in real life and represented here in VR, is one of the signs of the end.