adibas

Zaza Burchuladze (Georgia)

2 ideas

1. Tbilisi clubbers party through the 2008 war

   In August 2008, while Russia and Georgia fight a brief war over South Ossetia, a set of privileged young Tbilisi characters largely carries on with parties, drugs, sex, and talk about brands, with the war reaching them mostly as distant noise and screen imagery. It does not leave them all untouched, though: Amiko is conscripted. The novel shows a group of urban young people staying mostly absorbed in consumption during a national emergency, not a whole generation untouched by it.

2. The knockoff brand as borrowed identity

   "Adibas" is a counterfeit Adidas, and it stands for a peripheral society assembling its identity from imitation Western labels. The characters perform a modernity they have bought as signs, not built. The fake logo marks the gap between the global culture they signal belonging to and the local catastrophe they actually live in.

Save and mark ideas in the app