September 23rd, at 18:00 Tbilisi time, the project: “Tbilisi as an Urban Assemblage” (Funded by the Rustaveli Foundation) and Doctoral Programm of Anthropology invite to a talk by Suzanne Harris-Brandts Assistant Professor, Carleton University and David Sichinava Instructor, Carleton University

Title: “Soft Power and Politics in the Adaptive Reuse of Tbilisi’s Institute of Marx, Engels, and Lenin (IMEL) Building”

Abstract:

In 1938, the Soviet Georgian administration inaugurated the iconic Institute of Marx, Engels, and Lenin (IMEL) in Tbilisi under pretences of socialist unity and friendship among Soviet nations. Three quarters of a century later, the same building – now privatised, heavily renovated, and re-branded – was re-inaugurated as the seven-star Biltmore Hotel. The hotel’s grand opening included an enormous video projection on the western façade, telling the story of a new friendship among nations, this time between independent Georgia and the United Arab Emirates as the hotel’s financiers. In this talk, researchers Suzanne Harris-Brandts and David Sichinava track the shifting politics of cultural diplomacy associated with this adaptive reuse project. The work contributes to a growing body of scholarship on cultural diplomacy by delving deeper into the social, political, and economic implications surrounding the particular use of friendship rhetoric in such practices. In doing so, it charts the manipulation of architecture to communicate international cooperation and the power of its patrons. Drawing from archival sources, field observations, media analysis, and focus groups, the work argues that, rather than an outmoded means of public service announcement, symbolic architecture continues to be a crucial arena for state politics, one entangled with new modes of spectacle in the city.

Speakers:

Suzanne Harris-Brandts Assistant Professor, Carleton University
[bio] Suzanne is Assistant Professor of Architecture & Urbanism, and Faculty Associate at the Institute of European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at Carleton University. She received her PhD in Urban and Regional Studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research brings together design and the social sciences to explore issues of power, equity, and collective identity in the built environment. It covers topics like iconic city building, incentivised urbanism, contested place meanings, and design’s relationship to conflict-induced displacement. Harris-Brandts has published on the politics of the built environment for journals like Nationalities Papers, Eurasian Geography & Economics, European Planning Studies, and Caucasus Survey. She is co-applicant on the Georgian Rustaveli National Science Foundation grant ‘Examining the Social Impacts of Large, Private Sector Urban Development in Batumi and Tbilisi’ (2019-2022), as well as the Canadian SSHRC Insight Grant ‘Gardens Otherwise and Elsewhere: A Historical and Ethnographic study of Georgian Gardens’ (2021-2026).

David Sichinava Instructor, Carleton University
[bio] David holds a PhD in Human Geography from Tbilisi State University where he was also formerly an assistant professor cross-appointed with the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences and the International School of Economics. Sichinava now lectures at Carleton University’s Institute of European, Russian and Eurasian Studies. In 2016, he was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar in Geography at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Sichinava’s research focuses on the social, spatial, and temporal aspects of inequity, the politics of urban development, and the role of civil society in urban policy. He is Principal Investigator on the Georgian Rustaveli National Science Foundation grant ‘Examining the Social Impacts of Large, Private Sector Urban Development in Batumi and Tbilisi’ (2019-2022). As a Research Director at CRRC-Georgia, Sichinava has also led projects investigating regional geopolitics and issues of minority inclusion.