Voids out of Place and Politics below the State in Georgia

What's in a Hole? Voids out of Place and Politics below the State in Georgia. In Repair, Brokenness, Breakthrough. F. Martínez & P. Laviolette (eds.)
Berghahn 2019

This chapter provides a typology of different holes in Georgia to understand the connection between social and material forms of order. The research explores the way in which urban voids and material failures participate in the articulation of political discourses, coming to regulate public life, keeping people on hold, perpetuating or mediating a particular (subterranean) order. I make use of the representational qualities of holes to study the intense oscillation between lack and excess, hence holes are here taken as devices to think with. In their incompleteness, holes enable and defy human agency simultaneously, blending us into their gravity. Often, material failures become a sign of the inability of the state to act or invest in maintenance, but they also convey ‘voids’ in the relationship between state and society, standing as a form of communication or separation, connecting people to the state in qualitative ways.