“‘The moment you enter—the first impression—is very important for me, the feeling that you are stepping up to another level. It has become a ritual, taking the first two steps in the club. I can already realize what might happen there. At Bassiani, I always feel the smell of dampness in the entrance, and when I miss this smell, I am comforted knowing that it is waiting for me there each night. At Khidi, I have the feeling of sound hitting me from the first step.’
During the summer of 2017, we interviewed visitors and employees of Bassiani and other clubs in Tbilisi. This book is an assemblage of stories about the nights on the dancefloor and everyday life in the capital of Georgia.
One year later the police raided the Bassiani and thereby triggered a series of protests by the ravers and counter-protests by conservative nationalists. In this fragile situation, we asked Lado Lomitashvili to take photos of the interiors of the different clubs in Tbilisi to accompany the stories we heard during that summer.”
A vibrant documentation of the nightclubs of Tbilisi that covers some serious topics such as politics, history, drug use and queerphobia; personal accounts and stories accompanied by photographs of club interiors, soft cover, 17 x 11 cm, 112 pages, (Hamburg) 2017