WIP
2025
‘Tatar man selling cocoons’, 1982, Caucasus , Tbilisi State Silk Museum Collection
artistic research in progress
If oil became the “black gold” of the Caucasus by the century’s end, silk was its “white gold” at the beginning. In 19th-century Georgia, Russian imperial officials and European industrialists—among them French entrepreneur Edouard Castellaz—mobilized silkworms and imprisoned women to build a silk empire that could rival France and Italy. This research traces how sericulture (which was usually practised by Caucasian women at home) was transformed into a colonial infrastructure of soft power, where labor was gendered, bureaucratized, and aestheticized. Drawing on archival and material analysis, it repositions silk as a weapon of imperial governance.
If oil became the “black gold” of the Caucasus by the century’s end, silk was its “white gold” at the beginning. In 19th-century Georgia, Russian imperial officials and European industrialists—among them French entrepreneur Edouard Castellaz—mobilized silkworms and imprisoned women to build a silk empire that could rival France and Italy. This research traces how sericulture (which was usually practised by Caucasian women at home) was transformed into a colonial infrastructure of soft power, where labor was gendered, bureaucratized, and aestheticized. Drawing on archival and material analysis, it repositions silk as a weapon of imperial governance.