Work in progress
My dust across: Kataula
The Heidelberg Series
The Heidelberg Series
2024
Heidelberg Materials (Previously Heidelberg Cement) is a German multinational building materials company. Operating across 50 countries, Heidelberg is a world's second largest cement producer, and third largest for ready mixed concrete. While being numerously accused of causing uncontrollable environmental destruction, Heidelberg also facilitates multitudes of oppressions by quarrying the land of Palestinians in the West Bank and giving away the raw material to the occupants, as well as disposing waste in proximity to predominately Black neighbourhoods in Alabama, USA. In an attempt to position themselves as a symbol of sustainability, the company invites architects and designers to create sleek art objects from “CO2-neutral cement”.
Offering a counter-narrative rooted in the locality of Kavtiskhevi, Georgia told by artist’s grandmother: the work seeks to dismantle Heidelberg Cement’s carefully curated image of responsibility. Using Heidelberg cement (sourced from the limestone quarries of their native village Kavtiskhevi), the artist confronts the enduring legacies of German extractivism. Georgian legislation, which permits mining until total resource depletion, underscores the eschatological violence of this process. Cement tiles, made from the same Heidelberg cement bear photographic imprints of Kavtiskhevi’s residents, plants, and non-human life, rendering the erasure visible. Meanwhile, quarry waste foraged on site is repurposed into ceramics and glazes, transforming them into artifacts resisting commodification. The resulting artwork seeks to reclaim the complicit material into a surface for truth-telling and accountability.
‘`Kavtiskhevi is an ordinary village in Shida Kartli, Sakartvelo. If not for the shared effort of surrounding hills and rivers for over thousands of years, our village would be deserted and windy. Sometimes when it still got windy, my grandmother would tie a broom to a tree in our garden to stop the wind.
My grandmother used to tell me that in the previous century, about 50 years ago, German (through her words) ‘technologists’ came to the village. These technologists asked the villagers for consent to mine kaolin from a hill, which the Kavtiskhevi locals call Kataula. According to the Germans, the material extracted from the mountain would make valuable porcelain. My grandmother resisted and sent them away. Grandma loved to pick the chicory and hollies (Eryngium Caucasicum) on the mountain and walk on its slopes, just as locals took their animals to pasture there and to this day continue the tradition of burying their ancestors on Kataula. And all the children of course enjoyed hiking and playing there.
The Germans who visited my grandmother finally had a name. Instead of producing precious porcelain, they produce cement. As years pass by, a thin layer of white dust swathes the village. It can be limestone, sandstone or cement dust from the nearby cement factory. This factory is 4 kilometers away and the residents claim that the cancer rates have significantly risen since.
Where children's cries today are no longer a common sound, the company continues to extract the limestone they desire with ease. However it's not only raw material they control, but also how our view of native land is so violently transformed through ‘seeing’ land as a technical landscape where manufacturing consent for boundless, infinite destruction is something easily imaginable, and therefore attainable.’
5 x 5
Porcelain, Glaze
Ceramic glazes created from the Quarry waste of Heidelberg Cement Georgia in Kavtiskhevi, Georgia
Offering a counter-narrative rooted in the locality of Kavtiskhevi, Georgia told by artist’s grandmother: the work seeks to dismantle Heidelberg Cement’s carefully curated image of responsibility. Using Heidelberg cement (sourced from the limestone quarries of their native village Kavtiskhevi), the artist confronts the enduring legacies of German extractivism. Georgian legislation, which permits mining until total resource depletion, underscores the eschatological violence of this process. Cement tiles, made from the same Heidelberg cement bear photographic imprints of Kavtiskhevi’s residents, plants, and non-human life, rendering the erasure visible. Meanwhile, quarry waste foraged on site is repurposed into ceramics and glazes, transforming them into artifacts resisting commodification. The resulting artwork seeks to reclaim the complicit material into a surface for truth-telling and accountability.
‘`Kavtiskhevi is an ordinary village in Shida Kartli, Sakartvelo. If not for the shared effort of surrounding hills and rivers for over thousands of years, our village would be deserted and windy. Sometimes when it still got windy, my grandmother would tie a broom to a tree in our garden to stop the wind.
My grandmother used to tell me that in the previous century, about 50 years ago, German (through her words) ‘technologists’ came to the village. These technologists asked the villagers for consent to mine kaolin from a hill, which the Kavtiskhevi locals call Kataula. According to the Germans, the material extracted from the mountain would make valuable porcelain. My grandmother resisted and sent them away. Grandma loved to pick the chicory and hollies (Eryngium Caucasicum) on the mountain and walk on its slopes, just as locals took their animals to pasture there and to this day continue the tradition of burying their ancestors on Kataula. And all the children of course enjoyed hiking and playing there.
The Germans who visited my grandmother finally had a name. Instead of producing precious porcelain, they produce cement. As years pass by, a thin layer of white dust swathes the village. It can be limestone, sandstone or cement dust from the nearby cement factory. This factory is 4 kilometers away and the residents claim that the cancer rates have significantly risen since.
Where children's cries today are no longer a common sound, the company continues to extract the limestone they desire with ease. However it's not only raw material they control, but also how our view of native land is so violently transformed through ‘seeing’ land as a technical landscape where manufacturing consent for boundless, infinite destruction is something easily imaginable, and therefore attainable.’
5 x 5
Porcelain, Glaze
Ceramic glazes created from the Quarry waste of Heidelberg Cement Georgia in Kavtiskhevi, Georgia