Visual Podcast-Georgia/Armenia/Azerbaijan

Mustafa: I guess the war there did not get as ugly as they tended to in the Middle East in terms of civilian casualties.
Tobias: I suppose in international discourse one would classify the Russian act as an ‘incursion.’ They did invade deep into Georgian territory as I said, and ended up annexing a part of Georgia along the border.
So I arrived in Tbilisi to find myself in an entirely unfamiliar environment to the Middle East. Compared to my previous postings, literally nobody spoke English and I had no idea what the Georgian script said anywhere, even in grocery shopping. It was unlike anything I had ever faced in terms of interaction with a new social environment.

Mustafa: You were just lost in a very cold climate!
Tobias: I couldn’t speak the language and it was very cold, yes. The only thing I saw was lots of sad-looking men in black coats who kept saying ‘a’ara,’ which I came to realize was a filler word which could be used in many contexts.
I was put in a house halfway up a mountain in charge of three offices, two of which were in neighbouring Armenia and Azerbaijan. My first impression of the place was very sombre.

Mustafa: It sounds like you felt lonely. Did you eventually make friends?
Tobias: It took me a long time to cultivate relations. My work facilitated that.

Mustafa: Some of my favourite pieces in your art collection were acquired in Georgia.
Tobias: Yes, I ended up meeting amazing artists during my 3 years there. We formed collaborations with the main art school there, the opera house, and two main theatres.
One of the first projects we collaborated on with the art school entailed using recycled materials and items for the purpose of creating art installations. We had a number of capacity-building projects like that. Another project was led by an acclaimed theatre maker who came over from the UK to create a piece of verbatim theatre which was a new trend at the time.

Mustafa: Elaborate on the verbatim theatre.
Tobias: She interviewed and recorded the voices of actual refugees of the 2008 war and created a play based on their precise words.

Mustafa: That was created refugees?
Tobias: Internally-displaced refugees, yes. The play premiered in the famous Rustaveli Theatre and went on to the Edenborough theatre festival, which is one of the biggest in the UK. It won 5 stars. The actors wore head-pieces where they heard the real recording of the dialogues and performed them in real time without having memorized them. It was an exceptionally powerful piece of theatre in the Georgian language which was translated for the benefit of English speaker. By the end of the play the entire audience was in tears. The production was called ‘Do We Look Like Refugees?’ and it made a point of not depicting the characters as victims.

Mustafa: What other work were you involved with in your 3 years in the South Caucuses?
Tobias: I cultivated a network of teachers and educators for English all around the region of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. There was plenty of administrative and financial matters to tend to. For example, when we did projects we needed local governmental and private sponsorships. In Georgia and Azerbaijan, I was the main director, but in Armenia I was simply an overseer for the director there to report to. A subject that was present for us to be sensitive to was the unresolved historic ethnic conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Mustafa: These are all former Soviet states, correct?
Tobias: Yes. I got the feeling that by the time I got there, Georgia leaned more towards Turkey and the West. Armenia and Azerbaijan seemed to have closer links to the Russian socio-political sphere of influence.

Mustafa: What was your experience as a Westerner in former Soviet Republics?
Tobias: I did not face negativity per se. Automatic cultural links of the people did lean towards the East, namely Russia, and to me that only represented an opportunity for more interesting creations in arts and cultural exchange.
During Soviet times, the rich elite in these countries owned properties in St. Petersburg or Moscow. Borders were non-existent and they spent half their time there. Therefore, the heritage of these countries is still largely Soviet.

Mustafa: Being British there must have been characterized in a way or another.
Tobias: There was the fact that nobody spoke English. Everything just took that much longer to achieve because translators and interpreters were a fact of life.
Because the automatic cultural links did not lean towards Western Europe, it was more of a challenge to convince people of a vision or another. The younger generation seemed more enthusiastic about collaborating with Western or UK art. An example of such resistance would be the differences in theatre styles. Whereas in Syria, the theatre scene conformed more with French influences, and theatre scene in Georgia was very much according to Russian standards.

Mustafa: I’d like to expand the scope of the conversation a bit, before we move on to your next posting which was Oman. The reason for that is because Oman is the point in your life story where your path crossed mine, and I imagine the conversation will turn into one where both of us are personally invested. Furthermore, Oman seems to hold a historically distant location in terms of the themes we gloss over in our talk. Politically in modern times, Oman has maintained a neutral position in global conflicts, albeit the social fabric of Omani society having a similar conservative tone. Thus, the same themes will come up also in our talk about your life after you met me.

Bearing in mind that we are wrapping up the part of your life which preceded your arrival to where you and I met, I’d like you to broadly comment on the theme of ‘Western superiority.’ That attitude can sometimes colour interactions in cross-cultural communication. What legacy of colonization did you have to confront in general?

Tobias: The attitude which I always maintained was one where I was not there to teach any one anything. All I did was facilitate for people to come together and create something
interesting which served their own freedom of thought. Maintaining that I am here to facilitate, rather than to preach, helped me gain solidify trust.

Mustafa: You were, therefore, redefining British presence in a way that conformed to your individually-held values.
Did you find yourself having to renounce the rest of British presence in the past or the present?

Tobias: Probably yes. I reminded myself that I was in no position to conduct any political affairs.

Mustafa: It is a difficult line to tread.
Tobias: Yeah. An example of a sensitive line was when we worked in Syria on a project which brought together renowned cartoonists from the UK to work with highly talented Syrian cartoonists. The art form itself was well-established in Syria. However, cartoons had been controversial because of the controversial Mohmmed cartoons which caused many Muslims to feel antagonized.
Another example was that of a project which aimed to raise social issues such as women’s issues themes like with drugs or young pregnancies. When the idea was presented to the head of the Women’s Association in Syria, it became instantaneously clear that she was very close to the ruling system and was never going to trust us as she was very stern towards us.She refused to lend us her resources and collaboration, but the project went ahead with support from alternative partners.

Mustafa: I suppose that it can turn challenging or even confusing to find oneself representing an automatic identity or a country in a complex web of international actors.
Considerations probably had to be made for states, interest groups, multinational corporations, and other rich and powerful international entities. In the end, when an average person claims a platform, one actor or another is bound to be offended and take punitive action, regardless of where on Earth they are based if their interests are challenged.

Tobias: True, and we did not always succeed. For example, I never managed to conduct projects with students on the secondary level in Syria. Everywhere else I worked, we had access to working with young students. We did work in Syria with higher education institutions and youth organizations, but never with secondary school students hard as we tried.
Alternatively, we collaborated with Tate art galleries to form connections with educational organizations for kids in Syria. Kids from the UK came to Syria and kids from Syria went to the UK. Both delegations created art which was in response to art that they respectively saw of the other group. This culminated in the first exhibition of young persons’ work in the Tate galleries.
We found ways to seek alternatives when our original suggestions were met rejection or distrust, and the project with Tate managed to showcase Syrian youth in a very different light than was expected by the average public in the UK.

Mustafa: The more authoritarian a ruling regime, the less likely for international cultural exchange organizations to have access to young people. If one studies the massive anti-Western rallies that the Iranian government funds and encourages in their capital every year, one would observe that many of the attendees are young students who are transported in from all over the country. A regime of the sort would want to isolate young minds, as it were, and saturate them with propaganda as early in life as possible.
Shall we then move on to talk about where you went next?

Tobias: Before we do that, I’d like to comment about LGBT life in Georgia. After having lived in Muslim-majority countries for most of my life, and in places where to varying degrees an LGBT person found oneself to have to be closeted in a manner or another, I expected Georgia, being a ‘Christian’ country, to be more relaxed in that sense. I was mistaken.
Compared to most places where I lived, Georgia was definitely one of the most oppressive for LGBT people at the time. Violence against sexual minorities was more so the norm there.

Mustafa: No Arab country, with the exception of Lebanon, would even have a pride march as a topic of discussion. However, in Arab cities where you lived there still existed bars and businesses where it was an open secret that they were gay-friendly. Was Georgia not like that?

Tobias: While I was in Georgia, a couple of pride marches were attempted and met with violence and suppression. I myself did not come to be aware of any bars as such. Even though as a country, Georgia worked on forging closer economic ties with Europe. That did not spread into the social reforms sphere with regard to respecting the human rights of LGBT people. Perhaps nowadays there is more visibility for LGBT people, but I suspect they feel more exposed to be targeted now as a result of the openness.
While I was there I met one guy and was involved with him romantically for a short period of time. He was extremely closeted and nervous of being found out.