Interviews, Issue 9

Thea Djordjadze

Become Like a Resonance Chamber

Words LOUISA ELDERTON

Photography DANIEL FARÒ

With a practice anchored in process, based on an ongoing flow of reusing, reconfiguring, and rearranging objects, my conversation with Thea Djordjadze is also an experience that flows and folds back in upon itself — topics revisited along the way. We speak in Berlin, where the artist has lived and worked for over two decades, though she grew up in Tbilisi, Georgia. With a dialogue between her past and present works, Djordjadze’s interest in shaping material in relation to space is precise, and often emerges specifically during an exhibition’s installation; subtle imperfections, small nuances, and peripheral details are treated with the same sense of care as the more overtly monumental. We opened by discussing memory in all its complexity.

LOUISA ELDERTON: I was hoping to begin with the idea of material memory. Echo is such an important concept in your work — the memory of past exhibitions being reframed, but also the way materials seem to carry their own memory independently of that. Then there’s the viewer’s memory: how a material continues to resonate after they’ve left the exhibition. What does material memory mean to you, and how do you approach it in your work?

THEA DJORDJADZE: Recently, I started working, quite accidentally, with a special kind of aluminum. When you heat it, it transforms. You strike it several times, and it becomes incredibly pliable. You can bend it back, but it never returns fully to its original form. Even if you try to restore it, there’s always a trace, a resistance, a restraint. This aluminum starts to behave almost like plaster. You can sculpt with it. It appears solid, like a permanent sculpture, something unbreakable. But in reality, it’s fragile.

What interests me is that, despite its fragility, it holds memory. You see all the wrinkles, the marks — evidence of what it has been through. Sometimes it breaks, sometimes it doesn’t. Before, I was more focused on materiality and form. Now I’m more drawn to these traces in the material.

You can recognize this quality in objects, how they communicate with you. They resonate, whether through their form or how they are placed in space. This processed aluminum can look stable, yet you sense it has endured something. That tension speaks to me, similarly to architecture or surfaces that hold time.

LE: There’s a word for it — palimpsest — a layering of time. In Berlin, for instance, you can see it clearly: walls carry visible memory from war, from air, from time itself. These untouched surfaces reveal everything.

TD: In Tbilisi, where I’m from, it’s similar. That sense of time always stays with me. This is what drives me to make something or place something, in a way that allows another person their own reading.

LE: Like taking a sense of home with you wherever you go? A kind of transferable home? In connection with that, I’m curious to know what grounds you? And by extension, what excites you? The way you described walking through the city, observing buildings and surfaces, suggests you’re always alert to material, always translating the world into potential exhibitions. But how do you stop and root yourself, emotionally and psychologically?

TD: I try not to think too much, to just let life be, to let it act on me. I need that urgency of response. I don’t want to over-prepare or obsess. I prefer immediacy — responding to what’s happening in the moment. Without that, I don’t think I could feel grounded. Or maybe I’m grounded by being empty-minded — walking through life with a clear head, observing things as they are, without overanalyzing everything.

LE: So being grounded is about presence — being truly in the moment?

TD: Being is the moment. Everything you think you’re missing could already exist in a single second. But I don’t think of it as a moment — every moment is the moment.

LE: I love the way you speak about urgency, and how enabling openness or stillness creates space for a certain energy — that sense of urgency — to emerge. That really distills something about your practice and your approach.

TD: Yes, immediacy is essential — it’s how my psyche works in relation to the work. Without urgency and immediacy, nothing happens. They exist side by side. I think it’s more about reaction than action, although maybe both at once. I tend to make fast decisions. That speed becomes a tool in itself.

LE: Do you think of yourself as someone who is reactive, or perhaps, impulsive?

TD: Not at all. It’s actually the opposite. While I do have an urge to react within a space or in relation to a work, I’m not impulsive in life. If someone tells me something, I wouldn’t just react emotionally or flip out. I try to translate that instinct into the work, to understand how and why a reaction or a sense of impulsiveness might be necessary. Sometimes it’s about saying yes or no to what the space demands. I often feel there’s a sort of dictatorship at play between space, artist, subject, sculpture, and materiality.