Uta Bekaia: Eau de Cologne began when four of us, Giga Gulverdashvili, Natuta Bagrationi, Dato Koridze and I, came together to create a party series. We wanted to create a space where people could freely express their sexuality, gender and identity. The strict door policy and dress code create a sense of equality on the dance floor: once inside, everyone is on the same level. We came from different creative backgrounds, which became one of the project’s strengths. Today, we are slowly growing our community in Georgia and internationally, with residents including Cormac, MVHY and GeorgiシooOoOOoO, alongside co-founders Citizen Union and Natuta.

UB: The underground scene has played an important role in the development of the Georgian queer movement. It has created protected spaces where self-expression can exist more freely than in many other parts of public life. On the dance floor, the limitations of everyday life are temporarily suspended, allowing a strong, self-defined culture to grow. It is not simply an imported idea of queerness, but something rooted in our own experiences, bodies, aesthetics, friendships and histories. The underground has therefore been more than nightlife. It has been a space for experimentation, community and survival.

UB: It allows us to build an entire artistic world. In Tbilisi, there are still very few spaces where queer art can be presented openly, so Eau De Cologne creates a temporary environment where artists can work without censoring themselves or separating their identity from their practice. Bringing together music, performance, costume, photography, installation and visual art allows us to tell a more complete story. Artists including Levan Mindiashvili, David Apakidze, Fagatta and Raffaella Toxicana are documenting Georgian queer self-expression in real time, and we are happy to bring that work to KREUZWERK.

UB: I think it is, but celebration has a very different meaning in a repressed country like Georgia than it might in Berlin. Simply occupying space openly as a queer person can become a political act. Dancing, being visible, touching another person, wearing something extravagant or expressing your gender freely can all become forms of resistance. For us, self-expression and dancing are political and social acts, even when we are not consciously making a political statement. At the same time, I wish we had the privilege of romanticising it less. We would much rather live in a situation where queer joy could simply be celebration.

UB: It is extremely important. The Georgian queer movement is still relatively young and constantly searching for its own language. We do not want to simply reproduce models developed elsewhere. We need to understand queerness through our own history, symbols, rituals and cultural references. Artists have an important role in that process because there is no preexisting manual telling us what our culture is supposed to look like. We are making it as we go. Reinterpreting tradition allows us to challenge the idea that it belongs only to one group or political ideology. Tradition can be questioned, transformed and reimagined.

UB: It is almost impossible for an artist to completely separate their personal life from their artistic practice, especially within marginalised communities. When your identity is something you constantly have to negotiate with your family, community, institutions or the state, the personal inevitably becomes political. For us, finding a way to live authentically is not only an individual process. We are collectively trying to make a path for ourselves and those who come after us. The personal therefore becomes collective, and a private act of self-expression can become part of a larger cultural movement.

UB: Documentation allows us to preserve what is happening above and below the surface. Without it, the histories we are creating can disappear. Future generations need evidence that these lives existed and that these spaces were created. Photography can therefore function as collective memory. Dato’s work is not simply documenting parties, protest and everyday life. It is documenting a particular period of Georgian social history through a queer gaze. Without those images, we might know that something happened, but it would be much harder to understand what it felt like to live through it.

UB: We want the Berlin queer community to see how we live, what we create and what our world looks and feels like. It is also important to show what could potentially be lost. At a moment when queer rights and visibility are under increasing pressure, we want to make visible the rawness, vitality and complexity of underground life. That is why we use different artistic media. Each can communicate something the others cannot. Rather than giving the audience one fixed interpretation, we want them to make their own connections. The party becomes a form of storytelling, fragmented, emotional, symbolic and collective.