together alone : generic architecture

Contribution to the Tbilisi Architecture Biennial 2020 What do we have in common? file. More info on biennial.ge

Even the most striated city gives rise to smooth spaces: to live in the city as a nomad, or as a cave dweller.
— Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari

Georgia has a long tradition of cave settlements. Uplistsikhe, its oldest city, was carved out in a cliff overlooking the Mtkvari River between the 5th and 6th century BCE. With the diffusion of Christianity in the 4th century CE and the subsequent initiation to asceticism by the Thirteen Assyrian Fathers returning from Cappadocia in the 6th century CE, numerous rock-cut hermitages proliferated across the country, such as the renowned monasteries of David Gareja and Shio-Mgvime, or the communities at Zedazeni and Garedzhi.

Through centuries, deserts and mountains of Georgia offered refuge and protection to the monks in a grim and hostile land: a territory of passage between East and West, land of endless conflicts, incursions, and plunders through centuries. These earliest forms of monasticism were often loose aggregations of hermits departing from cities to live in scattered caves for contemplation, gathering around a small church for the eucharist's celebration, a water source, and occasionally a communal kitchen. Reconsidering the paradigmatic example of the royal monastery of Vardzia, what follows are a series of thoughts about its extreme form of collective living, where the hermit's cells, rhythms, and actions were physically and mentally bound together by the depth of the mountain, a commonly agreed rule, and practice of asceticism.

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Mirian Khutsishvili, one of Georgia's pioneering anthropologists and video ethnographers, spent decades roaming and documenting the life, rituals, populations, languages, shrines, and religious communities across Caucasus' mountainous regions. Among his invaluable collection of films preserved at the Georgian National Museum in Tbilisi is a rare footage shot in the southwestern province of Samtskhe-Javakheti in the late 1960s. [1]

The film features the monastery of Vardzia, an architectural complex entirely carved out from the volcanic layers of tufa in the Erusheti mountains, dominating the left bank of the Mtkvari River, 200 kilometers south of Uplistsikhe. The black and white blurred images reveal an architecture almost indistinguishable from its context, recalling memories of other cities and rock-cut architectures across the world— from Matera to Petra, from Guyaju to Mesa Verde, from Zelve to Ajanta — all retaining a similar discernment of deep time entangled in their continuous geological reconstitution.
King George III (1156-1184) initiated the excavation of Vardzia in the second half of the 12th century, laying out the first tiers of cave-dwellings as an outpost of the kingdom against the continuous incursions of the Seljuq sultans over the southern border. The area had been densely inhabited since the Bronze Age by Trialeti populations and, two centuries before the construction of the monastery, the cave settlement of Ananauri already dominated the western side of the same cliff, comprising irrigation canals, a water reservoir, terraces, workshops with annexed gardens and vineyards extending across the valley. [2]

Vardzia prospered under Queen Tamar the Great (1184-1213), King George's heir and successor, who rearranged the whole complex around a hidden water spring and the Church of the Dormition, entirely decorated with mural paintings. [3] At that time, Vardzia hosted almost fifty thousand people in hundreds of cave dwellings, including also barns, cellars, and stables, sophisticated water and sewage systems, a network of subterranean tunnels and secret passages, meeting halls, bakeries, refectories, and kitchens, all arranged across nineteen tiers into a half-kilometer-long complex excavated from the pink-yellowish tufaceous layer of the cliff.

Queen Tamar's monastery was an agglomeration of cells, all mingled within the same tufaceous mass, opened into an extended holey surface. The word "cell" — from the Indoeuropean root kel, "to hide, to save," the Latin cell, "storeroom" and thus, kellar and cellar — etymologically indicates a cavity for storing any sort of things, often sunken or underground such as the secret recess of a shrine, preserving the statue of divinity and devotional offers. Unlike a room, which we usually consider having a certain degree of independence within an architectural system, the cell is the constituent atom for a broader collective organization. Implying repetition and multiplication, the cell aggregates in sequences, strata, or tissues, and its form can only be deduced from the logical concatenation of which it is part.

Specifically, within the Eastern Orthodox tradition, a kellíon indicates the hermit's refuge, who chose to live in relative isolation with other monks. In Vardzia, each cell had a southern exposure and generally consisted of three elongated spaces progressively recessing into the rock. A vast entrance space — used as an open-air loggia as well as a connecting space with the rest of the monastery — provided the primary source of natural light and preceded a living area, consisting of either flat or vaulted ceiling with excavated furniture, recesses for seatings, an alcove for sleeping, niches for domestic objects and tools. Finally, the darkest and coldest space in the back was used to store wine and provisions, making profitable use of its depth.

The cells were connected through covered porticoes running along the cliff's rugged surface, vertically linked across the different tiers through stairs, ladders, and hidden passages. Often the cells included a devotional chapel, witnessing the monastery's hybrid collective nature wherein people lived together alone: each in their excavated hermitage and yet all as singular expressions of the same liturgy. The individual rhythms collectively overlapped without completely merging, generating a constellation of kindred spirits, cells, caves, and tunnels, inside the monolithic plateau of the Erusheti mountain. [4]
Differently from a disciplinary apparatus — where the cramped space of the cell is to restrain actions and freedom of the convicts, subjected to a law externally imposed by strict surveillance — in the monastery of Vardzia, nothing is inflicted, as the monks willingly embrace a rule in thoughts and actions, through which life assumes a specific form indiscernible from the liturgy. Only communal living connotes a system of rules. In contrast, there are no problems with confrontation or agreement for an isolated individual: questions of form and language arise when being together, through encounter and negotiation with others beyond the self.

The construction of Vardzia marked the culminating point of Queen Tamar's politics, which would be remembered as the Golden Age of Georgia's history when the whole nation experienced its broadest commercial expansion, the foundation of the Empire of Trebizond, the thriving developments in all the sciences and the arts, from architecture to literature, and a consolidation of its internal politics with the unification into a feudal monarchy. The monastery served as a royal residence, as a cultural epicenter, and even as a military base for Tamar's troops in a campaign against Rüm, Rukn ad-Din Süleymanshah II, defeated by the Queen in the famous battle of Basian in 1205.

After Tamar's death, Vardzia was heavily damaged by an earthquake that destroyed most of its external porticoes, chapels, and cells in 1283. However, when Shah Tahmasp of Iran helped with his troops Atabag Kayhostro II to settle a revolt of local feudal lords in 1551, the historian Hasan Rumlu still described the monastery as an "inaccessible and impregnable stronghold," tantamount to the great wall of Alexander in Egypt and the Kybher pass in Afghanistan. Finally, when the forces of the Ottoman Empire took over the region in 1578, the monks abandoned Vardzia, and the monastery fell into decay until 1938 when declared the site as a museum-reservation, and the first archeological excavations of the 1970s, at the time of Mirian Khutsishvili's field research.

2
It's difficult to capture, draw, film, or photograph the monastery of Vardzia because of its depth. There's no beginning nor end to its architecture, but only the permanent transformation of its holey surface, which can only be represented as a totality. Every cell leads to the next one, and there are no traditional walls, ceilings, or structures as everything is excavated from the mass of tufa. The mountain is all around. Cavities and holes follow hidden lineages of material consistency, and it is not surprising that the nomadic science of metallurgy is believed to be had its earliest developments around here in the Meskheti region. [5]

Yet, the caves of Vardzia do not exude any sense of confinement or oppression. Instead, its hewn recesses keep breathing together with the imperceptible movement of material fluxes, in a constant state of erosion, sedimentation, and disarray, as a monument to the Mtkvari River's valley. A cave is the opposite of a traditional building. In subtracting rather than adding matter, it carves space out from a larger whole, achieving consistency, form, and resistance by the same mass it negates. The conditions for its existence do not belong to the cave itself but to the whole which it partakes: the mountain, the plateau, the dirt, the geological strata that makes it possible.

In this perspective, Mirian Khutsishvili's film or Alexander Roinashvili's photographs of Vardzia evoke Robert Smithson's writings and wanderings through archeological ruins, construction sites, and manufactured landscapes, where the wild energies of the metropolis evaporate into deserts of entropic sprawl."All boundaries and distinctions lost their meaning in this ocean of slate and collapsed all notions of gestalt unity, while the present fell forward and backward into a tumult of dedifferentiation" — annotates Smithson after visiting the Bangor's slate quarries in Pennsylvania — "How can one contain this oceanic site?" [6]

The notion of dedifferentiation, which Smithson derives from Anton Ehrenzweig's theories and, in turn, from Sigmund Freud's analysis of the oceanic feeling, indicates an intimate connection with the world and its constituting elements where distinctions between being and not-being, self and other, organic and inorganic, part and whole, here and there, disappear into a sense of oneness. [7] "Dedifferentiation suspends many kinds of boundaries and distinctions" — writes Ehrenzweig — "at an extreme limit, it may remove the boundaries of individual existence and so produce a mystic oceanic feeling that is distinctly manic in quality." [8]

For Smithson, "plunging" into the unbounded experience of dedifferentiation constitutes not only the primary stage for any creative process but also a way to exceed the limits of rationality, imposed behaviors, and social conventions. Once dissolved into the raw matter wherein it exists and operates, the self enters a zone of indiscernibility and pure possibility, when the "ego scatters and represses surface imagery," and where the figments of the mind and the jumbled museum of geological substructures merge into a life-nonlife continuum: "One's mind and the earth are in a constant state of erosion, mental rivers wear away abstract banks, brain waves undermine cliffs of thought, ideas decompose into stones of unknowing, and conceptual crystallizations break apart into deposits of gritty reason. Vast moving faculties occur in this geological miasma, and they move in the most physical way. This movement seems motionless, yet it crushes the landscape of logic under glacial reveries." [9]

For too long — claims Smithson— we have been estranged from time and matter, trapped in the hustle of immediacy and the excitement of novelty. Swaying between the deep time of geology and the confinement of the present is the entropy of the second law of thermodynamic eroding any breathing entity or rational thought. Dedifferentiation is a journey beyond the self, an itinerant ascetic practice to acknowledge the temporality embedded into things, transcending the social and rational "fictions" erected against the stream of time and its inevitable dissipation of energy. [10] "At the low levels of consciousness, the artist experiences undifferentiated or unbounded methods of procedure that breaks with the focused limits of rational techniques. The tools are undifferentiated from the material they operate on, or they seem to sink back into their primordial condition. (...) This entropy of technique leaves one with an empty limit, or no limit at all. (...)The rational critic of art cannot risk this abandonment into "oceanic" undifferentiation, he can only deal with the limits that come after this plunge into such a world of non-containment." [11]

The oceanic dedifferentiation is neither a passive nor threatening feeling of separation, but an intensification of connections, a joyful attempt to get rid of the self and embrace the generic potential of our species: what we have all in common, and that differently inhabits and substantiates each of us. What we are is never a predetermined point of departure but always the result of a never-ending process of becoming: the self is in a constant "individuation" that mediates between the generic dispositions of the species — our intellectual, linguistic, sensorial, mnemonic, projective and affective faculties — and the contingencies of the here and now. In a moment with threatening climatic changes, global warming, and mass extinctions that we come to know as Anthropocene, the caves of Vardzia seem to remind us of the relative dimension of architecture vis-à-vis the Earths' magnitude: the assemblage of extensive circumstances that both temporally and materially precede and outlives any constructed spatial manifestation of our species, inhabiting in every single of our gestures, thoughts, and objects, yet ignored within the restrained scale and conventional frames of our existence.

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Looking at Vardzia through the lens of dedifferentiation turns the asceticism of its community into a practice of radical kinship. Engaging in critical research on the self, away from the myths of identity and the fetters of individuality, the hermits opened up towards broader forms of affinity, friendship, and collectivity, becoming one with the mountain, together with the plurality of its organic and inorganic entities.

The term asceticism indicates a form of training to rationally control and amplify our potential — that is, the set of productive, material, intellectual and emotional capacities, which make us all human animals without distinction. More than a fugue from society, a devaluation of the world, or a commitment to austerity, asceticism could be considered an intensification of life and emancipation from imposed ideological constraints, as suggested in the Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche. Once subtracted from the Christian ideal — which inculcates the debt of sin through self-denial and inhibition, condemning to a life of atonement for a supposedly corrupted nature — asceticism becomes a means to affirm power over inertia and sacrifice. [12]

In opposition to Arthur Schopenhauer, who considered asceticism as an instrument to preserve one self’s existence through the suppression of the will of life "to cease to desire everything (…) to reinforce the greatest indifference towards everything," Nietzsche's asceticism is an immanent practice for the virtuous affirmation of life in all its forms: a lesson of productive rationalism and an antidote against the collective hypnosis, the illusion of promises, and the farce of politics. "I want to make asceticism natural again, but in place of the aim of denial, there will be the aim of strengthening: a gymnastics of the will, periods of fasting, a casuistry of deeds in regard to the opinions we have regarding our strengths, an experiment with adventure and arbitrary dangers, and even tests for one's strength in being able to keep one's word." [13]

As the hermits in Vardzia or Tariel in Shota Rustaveli's Knight in the Panther's Skin, Nietzsche's Zarathustra repeatedly abandons and returns to his cave: the necessary locus for absolute concentration and oceanic expansion, destined not to avoid temptations but the daily duties and useless working distractions, that "tyranny of stimuli and influences that condemns us to spend our strength in nothing but reactions and does not permit their accumulation to the point of spontaneous activity." [14] Dwelling the desert or carving the mountains are not withdrawals from society but forms of resistance aimed at probing its very structures, questioning the principles that make our life possible and unsustainable, while inventing new organization strategies for the coming community.

In this sense, asceticism is growing other to the self: a project of estrangement and oceanic exploration, a voluntary detachment from the neoliberal hypnosis that continually urges us to produce, document, accumulate, exhibit, and share any experience, activity, affect, or information, while quantifying and extorting their value. At the risk of being cynical, we should better concentrate on the shared solitude and distance that the threatening scenarios of contagion drastically imposed among us in the past months, rather than indulging in good-intentions for a future new-normal, additional strategies for open domesticity, or the improvement of sharing and communication technologies available only for specific societal strata. Unfortunately, there is no good "normal" to go back to, and the construction of the common is not pacific at all, as demonstrated by the strikes which took place in the past months against the restriction of freedom and rights, the racist use of police, the unsafe working conditions, rising unemployment and instability of the labor contracts. Now that our illusion of control over eternity is lost, we need to responsibly acknowledge the desert ahead of us. The common is never given, but always a quest.

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1 Mirian Khutsishvili passed away in 2013, leaving behind an incredible amount of work. I thank the National Georgian Museum for granting me the possibility to use samples from Khutsishvili's film Samtskhe-Javakheti for this short essay, and prof. Kevin Tuite from the University of Montréal for his precious suggestions.

2 Along the banks of the Mtkvari River, there are numerous other remains of both religious and secular cave settlements, including the isolated hermitages of Cholta, Margastani, and the monastery of Vanis Kvabi, built between the 8th and 9th century, which constitutes a sort of precedent of Vardzia, because of its tiers of caves, the presence of a communal church, refectory, and water aqueduct. Among the few available publications in English, Konstantin Nikolaevich Melitauri, Vardzia (State Publishing House Sabchota Sakartvelo, Tbilisi, 1963) and Ghivi Gaprindashvili, Ancient Monuments of Georgia: Vardzia, (Aurora Art Publishers: Leningrad, 1975) offer the most accurate account of the monastery and its history.

3 The church is oriented towards the East and thus parallel to the cliff. Its access is protected by a monumental narthex marking the center of the whole complex. Behind the church are the sacred pool of the water spring and a secret refuge accessible through a tunnel. The walls and the church's apse are entirely decorated with frescoes depicting scenes from the life of Christ, portraits of King George III, and the young Tamar with a church model in her hand. For a detailed description of the frescoes, see Ghivi Gaprindashvili, Ancient Monuments of Georgia: Vardzia, (Aurora Art Publishers: Leningrad, 1975): 19-25.

4 Roland Barthes dedicated an entire lecture course at the Collège de France in 1977 to the relationship between individual and collective, focusing on what he defined as the "fantasy" of idiorrhythmy: a way of living together where one acknowledges and respects others' unique rhythms, somehow between the extreme isolation of eremitism and the excessive assimilative community of an enlarged family. See Roland Barthes, How to Live Together. Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013): 118.

5 I am referring to the beautiful pages on metallurgy as nomadic science in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi, (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987): 404-415.

6 Robert Smithson, "A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects," (originally published in Artforum, September 1968), in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 110.

7 In a series of letters and then in his Civilization And its Discontents, Sigmund Freud discusses such a particular mystical condition with the French writer Romain Rolland, who coined the term "oceanic feeling." For Freud, the oceanic corresponded to a sort of infantile state, when the child is not yet aware of the self and narcissistically feels one with reality, passively immersed in an extended maternal womb. On the contrary, Rolland defines the oceanic as that vitalistic contact with the eternal permeating any religious system: "a sensation of 'eternity,' a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded—as it were, 'oceanic.' This feeling, he adds, is a purely subjective fact, not an article of faith; it brings with it no assurance of personal immortality, but it is the source of the religious energy which is seized upon by the various Churches and religious systems, directed by them into particular channels, and doubtless also exhausted by them. "In one of his letters to Freud, Rolland confesses that Baruch Spinoza's Ethics and his idea of a unique substance having an infinity of attributes and expressions inspired the notion of oceanic feeling, reverberating everywhere, especially in the mountains: "Movement is attributed to the sea, and is opposed to the immobile mountain.... Error! There is more movement in the mountain. On the one hand, the momentum from low to high, an aspiration more powerful than that of the cathedrals. On the other hand, the fall into the abyss... the silence of an underground stone cave, is it more profound, and by how much, than that of a prairie... ? (...)The entire universe is one unique, immense sound from which burst, like a ripe pomegranate, billions of harmonics, all composing one same oceanic harmony." See Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1961): 11-12, and Romain Rolland, Mémoires et fragments du Journal (Paris: Editions Albin Michel, 1956): 23-25.

8 Anton Erhenzweig, The Hidden Order of Art, A Study in the Psychology of Artistic Imagination (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969): 294.

9 "The strata of the earth is a jumbled museum. Embedded in the sediment is a text that contains limits and boundaries which evade the rational order, and social structures which confine art. In order to read the rocks we must become conscious of geologic time, and of the layers of prehistoric material that is entombed in the earth's crust. When one scans the ruined sites of pre-history one sees a heap of wrecked maps that upsets our present art historical limits." Robert Smithson, "A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects," (originally published in Artforum, September 1968), in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 100-113; and Anton Erhenzweig, The Hidden Order of Art, 19.

10 "When a thing is seen through the consciousness of temporality, it is changed into something that is nothing. This all-engulfing sense provides the mental ground for the object, so that it ceases being a mere object and becomes art. The object gets to be less and less but exists as something clearer." Robert Smithson, "A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects," 112.

11 Robert Smithson, "A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects," 102.