Tbilisi, Georgia

Some more stencilled, sprayed on items of graffiti on Tbilisi walls.  An art form which intrigues me as it develops

Stencil Graffiti I, Tbilisi, Summer 2007

Earlier this year, on my walks around Tbilisi I began noticing a new form of graffiti on city walls. This isn't the ugly spray-painting of people's names which has marred particularly the Vake district; nor is it the sophisticated polychrome work one is usd to seeing in major American cities. Rather, it is usually one-colour images sprayed on through a stencil of some kind. Some of them are quite large, over a metre high or wide, others smaller. One wall off Melikishvili St has a whole cluster of them. I decided to record the works using my cellphone camera. They are a sign of things changing in Tbilisi, along with: new roads; the central food market's current renovation (rather hard for the 1000 or more vendors and a shock to people like me who loved shopping there); the renovation of another building where anything could be brought for repair by people in small kiosks (they're out in the cold, or the heat, again); the impending removal of the Dry Bridge open-air nostalgia and art market; and so on. The city is gradually becoming more European or western, for good or otherwise.