Across Conflictual Borderland

Transhumance as a tool for tracing the landscape.
Caucasus Mountains
PhD Research, candidate Salome Katamadze, 2022-Ongoing
Politecnico di Milano, DAStU, UPDP
TU Delft, Border&Territories

How do we address conflictual border territories without losing their spatial and cultural qualitative aspects, and how can we, as architects and researchers, contribute to understanding the stratified challenges of such places? The research addresses the border’s socio-spatial dimension and the changes in landscape responding to the places of conflict and their spatial implications.

The research explores how the Greater Caucasus mountains have transformed, framing the borderland between Georgia and the Russian Federation and its continuous hostile dynamics throughout the last thirty years of the post-Soviet era. Based on the presupposition to narrate the territory through the Landscape as a social, cultural and physical artefact, the research aims to i) Critically investigate Spatial design theories and methodologies practising through fragile borderlands, ii) Renovate the tools of the border landscape’s representation, iii) Identify and narrate the Caucasus landscape’s cultural and physical transformations in juxtaposition to the borderline and its disputes.

The research conducts a spatial investigation that permits a qualitative inquiry perspective of borderlands. The study maps an in-depth narrative of the conflictual border landscapes in the Greater Caucasus Mountains through the Tranhusmance movement. The pastoral practice remains nearly the only anthropic witness of the landscape transformations; it seasonally frequents the borderline dynamics and transmutes with the consequences. The research does not point to offering resolutions to the stratified frictions. Nevertheless, it wants to render the consequences of the conflict tangible and provide an open field of possible spatial interpretations.