Sophio

Question 1: What is your name and your name at birth? What nationality is the passport you currently hold?

Sophio Medoidze (name now, name then).
British passport

Question 2: When and where does your biography as an artist start?

At the nursery, when I wrote and enacted my first poem about a rabbit that took a walk and disappeared. I am told I leaned how to write when I was 3.

Question 3: How many times have you shown your work in Georgia and when? / How many times have you shown your work elsewhere?

I have mostly show in the Uk (Serpentine gallery, Whitechapel gallery, Arnolfini Bristol, Swiss Cottage gallery etc), as well as Switzerland, Croatia, Portugal, Germany, France and Palestine.

Question 4: Why did you leave? / Why did you go back?

The motives for leaving Georgia were multiple and complex...Officially I left to study English, at this dubious language school in London which was very cheap. In fact I wanted to join my boyfriend who emigrated to the UK for political reasons. I think I always dreamt of living elsewhere, in another country, where I would be in a minority and live in a language that is not my own. There were other, more pressing reasons, like near im possibility of surviving in Tbilisi on a small income, the difficulty to access the resources for making art, unless you were part of the ‚elite‘. In fact I was more interested in the sub-culture and the burgeoning alternative music scene, which I felt more affinity with, as it was more mixed and also more experimental than the art scene; I was making work for the Radio, working with sound and spoken word primarily as well as DJing. I mean, the film school was such an abstract affair! we were taught to make films on paper, in theory...Just before I left in 2001, I have this vivid memory of embarking on an epic journey to the film school by foot, as the busses were not running, the tube was closed and I was too broke to take a taxi. I guess I got bored of those long walks and left when the opportunity arrived.

Question 5: Does your work reflect your biography?

My work is autobiographical in as much as it reflects who I am, but it is always multiple autobiographies instead of one. I am interesting in storytelling, its political potential, what it means to speak in many voices and in different languages. My work is about bringing multiple viewpoints together, different image modalities and putting them side by side. So there is this inherent multiplicity, even in the works which seem most perso-
nal and intimate; And the collapse of the protagonists, I am interested in that.. this question of who the protagonist is, who’s voice is it? where’s that music coming from? etc...But in a way I always speak about myself even when I speak about someone else.

Question 6: Do you have any influences from any Georgian visual art tradition which you apply to your work? Why?/Why not?

For a long time I was not aware of any specific influences by Georgian artists, I was always more
interested in structuralists, both in film and philosophy. But more recently, and after watching some of
Paradjanov’s films for the first time, I began to see the connections. Not an immediately obvious ones - we
work in an entirely different manner - he is interested in what is inside the frame, his editing is done in the
shot so to speak. Where is the layering in my work is of a different character, I use different technic. But in the end it‘s the fascination with cutting and pasting (Collage) that we both share. Also, like Paradjanov. I became interested in ethnographic narratives lately, in the past as such, and not just the recent past. Maybe we share a path of struggle also - what’s it like to always be on the frontier, between different countries and different languages, but also, between art and film.

Question 7: Would you define your practice as feminist?

I have a complicated relationship with what is now referred to as a feminist art. Sometimes it feels like
pigeonholing artists, or it is a trend, devoid of any real substance (or any real struggle for that matter). But I
have always been a feminist! and I grew up with this idea - both my mother and my grandmother were feminists.
I want to answer this question in another filmmakers words, Belgian filmmaker Chantal Ackerman‘s, who said ‚I am a
filmmaker who happens to be a woman.

Question 8:  Are you an active actant in the art scene of your current place of residence?

Art scenes of Georgia?

I don‘t know about the art scene, but I am in a constant dialogue with other people, artist or not. In fact this is were my inspiration comes from, rather than looking at art that is around. I have some artist friends and I try to go to their shows and that‘s that. I mostly talk to people I am interested in, both here and in Georgia, I listen to their stories and I might translate them into work later; If I were not an artist I think I would be a folk storyteller or something like that.