This project looks at the production and commodification of nostalgia based on the example of one building in Tbilisi. Through archival research and ethnographic analysis, it explores how the architecture of a house on Toradze Lane could accommodate different uses because of its eclecticism. The project looks at this building over the course of decades as a bundle with “affordances” and “constraints”: at certain times the former are actualized while the latter are muted. In this complex entanglement, a “make-believe space” is created in which an atmosphere of nostalgia can be commodified and sold. In creating a perfect site of nostalgia, such houses are often robbed of their primary function as residences. Their emptiness, especially visible during the time of the pandemic, stands in stark contrast to the role they are assumed to perform as the diverse, open, accessible Tbilisi courtyard of the nostalgic imagination.

Reading the different layers of the building as a palimpsest, this project looks at this house, one of the many with a similar fate, as a chronotope in which different temporalities and spatialities intersect. In the complex time-space entanglement, the time represented by the building multiplies itself, producing a heterotopia that is not localizable on a spatial or chronological axis, but that still palpably exists.