The art of sitting still: How the street chairs of Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital, taught a Russian émigré to slow down

Alexander Zakharenkov moved from Moscow to Tbilisi in 2022. Right away, he was struck by how many chairs, armchairs, and couches were sitting out on the street — a favorite place for street vendors, residents of nearby apartment buildings, and passersby to sit and rest. Zakharenkov started photographing these spots, and before long he even bought a chair of his own. He set it out on the street and watched it from his balcony to see what would happen to the chairs when their owners weren’t around. That first chair was stolen almost immediately, so Zakharenkov bought a new one. After two years in Tbilisi, he edited a video essay about his fascination with the city’s chairs and built a website featuring film photographs of the most unusual seats he had found. Here are his photos and the project’s story in his own words.Soon after moving, I started walking around Tbilisi a lot. On those walks, I kept noticing chairs everywhere. I like shooting on film when I’m out walking, and I quickly realized that, from a 36-exposure roll, 20 shots were of armchairs, chairs, and benches. In Tbilisi, people often just sit outside — attitudes toward public space here are more relaxed than in Russia.Little by little, I built up a big collection of chair photos and decided to make a video project about them. I really love [the American documentary filmmaker] John Wilson and his show “How To with John Wilson.” I wanted to make something in that same style. At the same time, I was trying to get a Georgian passport, and I thought the project might help me feel like I belonged in Tbilisi. In the end, though, the project turned out to be about the city rather than about me.My dad is from Georgia. He and his family lived in Sukhumi, and during the Georgian-Abkhaz conflict they moved to Moscow. So I was born and raised in Russia. I lived in a Moscow neighborhood where [the neo-Nazi Maxim Martsinkevich, known as] Tesak operated — there were sometimes so-called “cleansing” raids in our area on weekends, and you’d see skinheads on the streets. Largely because of that, I suppressed the Georgian part of my identity until I was 18.Even [before the full-scale war began] in 2022, I was thinking about living in Georgia for six months. At the time, I was working as a camera operator at Stand-Up Club No. 1, and [the comedian] Idrak [Mirzalizade] had just been forced out. There was a lot of anxiety in the air and rumors of war, so I started thinking about moving. Then the war really did break out, and I had to leave in a hurry.There was “Fuck Russians” graffiti everywhere here, so now I had to hide the fact that I was Russian. I ended up feeling at home among strangers and like a stranger among my own. I remember walking into a shop in my Tbilisi neighborhood once and speaking to the cashier in Georgian, and she immediately switched to Russian. Right after that, I went to an expat coffee shop, and the staff there immediately spoke to me in Georgian. It left me wondering: “Who am I, anyway?”***After two years in Tbilisi, I moved to Serbia. I realized I still didn’t feel as comfortable in Tbilisi as I’d hoped. You can find a lot of cool chairs in Serbia, too — especially farther from the center, and even right near my building.In Belgrade, a few people have even recognized me on the street and asked, “When are we getting Belgrade chairs?” But I already did that project about Tbilisi and have moved on from the subject. I don’t want to repeat myself — I want to do a different project about Belgrade.In Moscow, the pace of life didn’t suit me. Everyone there is always rushing somewhere. In Georgia, I noticed I was walking faster than the people around me. Seeing people on the street just sitting and relaxing used to make me anxious. So during my first year, I learned from Georgians how to slow down and actually live.For about a year, I deliberately went around photographing seats all over the city: whenever I spotted a cool chair, couch, or armchair, I’d take a picture of it. What I liked about the project was that there were almost no people in the frame. In fact, I made a point of avoiding them. I understand why people in Tbilisi feel the way they do about Russians right now, and partly because of that, I wanted to photograph the chairs themselves rather than the people sitting on them.Then I put a chair out in front of my building and staked it out for two weeks. I just set up a camera on my balcony. Nobody could even see it — I was watching people from a distance, from the 10th floor. After that, I didn’t do anything with the footage for a year and a half.Eventually, though, I edited the photos and footage into a video essay. It combines three different formats: my film photographs, video shot with a modern camera, and surveillance-style footage of the chair, shot from my balcony on an old camcorder.The first chair I put out on the street was stolen quickly. It was a nice, new chair, and I didn’t live in the best neighborhood. When I first set it outside, I was really scared — I kept going out to check on it every 15 minutes. When someone finally stole it five hours later, I actually felt relieved.So I decided to chain up the second chair: I had lots of photos of chained-up chairs in my collection, and I realized their owners had good reason to worry. I chained the second chair to a heavy cinder block, and that put my mind at ease. I figured the only way someone could steal it was if they came specifically prepared to take the chain off.I remember that after I’d already finished filming from the balcony, Georgia qualified for soccer’s European Championship, and everyone was celebrating wildly. I woke up one day, looked out from the balcony, and saw that the chair was gone. I thought it had been stolen, but when I went downstairs, I saw that someone had just moved it closer to the road — apparently so they could sit near the traffic and wave at the cars going by. The whole city was honking that day.Because the chair had been moved out by the road, it ended up on Google Street View. By pure coincidence, the Google camera car drove down that street on that exact day. So the chair has gone down in history.In Georgia, you can just put a chair out on the street, and it becomes your own spot that you share with others. You create your own little hangout. Every time I left my building, it was nice to see someone sitting in that chair and taking a break.Six months later, the second chair was stolen after all — I figure it’s sitting in someone’s yard now. I’d love to know where it ended up and why the person took it. The thief clearly went to a lot of trouble to haul it off, coming out at night with a sledgehammer or a hammer specifically to get it, since the chair was chained down.When my video about the chairs came out, viewers sent me a lot of nice messages — comparing me to John Wilson, for example. Someone even recommended that I watch his show. Others wrote that they felt bad my chair had been stolen. Judging by the usernames, Georgians left comments too. One person wrote: “Bro, you put that chair [the first chair] in the kind of spot where if you left your dick out overnight, they’d suck every drop of cum out of it.”At some point, I realized I had accumulated too many repetitive photos of chairs. I decided to look for and shoot only one-of-a-kind chairs. And once I was down to getting about two shots over several weeks of walks, I stopped doing it. Not on purpose — it just happened naturally.At Meduza, we are committed to transparency about our use of artificial intelligence in the newsroom. The story you’re reading was written by one of our living, breathing journalists and translated from Russian using an AI model configured to follow our strict editorial standards. This translation process is the result of extensive testing and refinements to ensure our English-language coverage is timely and accurate. A Meduza editor reviews every draft before publication.If you find any errors in this translation, please contact us at [email protected].To read Meduza’s exclusive content in English, please subscribe to our newsletter.Meduza