Jana Romanova

Shvilishvili

The Georgian ‘shvilishvili’ translates as ‘grandson’ or ‘granddaughter’, and even the construction of this word refers to succession: literally it means ‘son of the son’.

The appearance of the book was preceded by my reflections on the value of family photography, on the institution of the family in the modern world, and on how to retain familial ties between people separated by state borders and tragic family events.

The book ‘Shvilishvili’ features the story of how I met relatives living in Georgia. The connection uniting the Georgian and Russian branches of our family was my grandfather and grandmother, who lived in St. Petersburg. They were both killed in January 1999, and since that time dialogue between the two parts of the family ceased to all intents and purposes. It was only many years later that I arrived in Tbilisi for a holiday and suddenly discovered I have numerous relatives in this country.

Meeting my Georgian family was accompanied by the ritual of collective photographs: I asked each new relative to pose for a photography with another member of the family, chosen at their discretion. As a result this chain extended from the small Georgian village of Sakasheti and linked several dozen people together before coming to an end in a cemetery in St. Petersburg, at the grave of my grandmother and grandfather. The first part of the book is devoted to this.

The second part comes from the fact that, as it turned out, many of my relatives in Georgia had kept photographs of my grandmother. She began sending these snapshots after her marriage and the move to St. Petersburg, so I had never seen them before. By collecting these fragments as testimony of different events in her life, I am trying to combine and align them in a definitive sequence that could tell me who she really was.

But no letters have been preserved and nobody remembers the details; all I can do is see the circumstantial evidence gazing at me from the old plastic bags where my relatives keep family photos.