A Measure of Samshvilde

A Measure of Samshvilde examines the distance between a landscape and its records. Through photography, archival traces and a hand-built instrument, the work asks what remains unmeasurable—and what it means to photograph a place one cannot fully know.

A MEASURE OF SAMSHVILDE

I arrived in Samshvilde, southern Georgia, as a stranger.

Egyptian-Italian, unfamiliar with its language and with the histories embedded in its ground, I began photographing with a question: what authority do we assume when we make an image of a place we do not fully know?

Samshvilde survives through competing forms of evidence. Archaeological surveys, historical maps, ruins, oral memory and the contemporary landscape each describe a territory that never entirely coincides with the others. Walking with these records, I encountered entrances that had disappeared, boundaries that had shifted and architectures that persisted only as fragments. The landscape continually exceeded the systems intended to describe it.

A Measure of Samshvilde inhabits this discrepancy.

Photography became less a means of documenting the territory than a way of negotiating my own position within it. Each image is understood as an act of selection: to frame is to separate, to preserve one thing while allowing another to remain outside the image. The camera cannot be neutral. It produces another record, another partial version of the place.

I began translating these inconsistencies into measurements. From archaeological systems of datum and coordinate, I designed a timber instrument intended to measure something for which no objective unit exists: absence.

But the instrument itself resisted the certainty of its drawing. I built it alongside Georgian craftspeople with whom I shared no fluent language. Its construction unfolded through pointing, demonstration, repetition, correction, the sound of tools and pieces of timber passing between hands. Knowledge moved without complete translation. What emerged was no longer solely the object I had designed, but the physical record of an encounter.

I carried the instrument back into Samshvilde and photographed it against the territory it was incapable of measuring.

Across landscape, archaeological fragment, human gesture and constructed object, the series brings together three technologies that promise to hold reality still: the map, the measuring instrument and the photograph. Each ultimately fails.

That failure is the subject of the work.

A Measure of Samshvilde does not attempt to resolve the landscape into a definitive account. It considers what happens when photography acknowledges the limits of its own evidence—when looking becomes not an act of possession, but one of attention.

The landscape was never mine to explain. The photographs remain instead as traces of having been there: of walking, misunderstanding, measuring, making, and encountering a place that continually refused to be contained.