Quaking Time: Visual Ethnography on Memory and the Gulag in Georgia

On October 22, 2025, Laura Mafizzoli published her visual ethnographic vignette entitled “Quaking time” in Otherwise Magazine. The piece draws on Laura’s PhD ethnographic work on the ambivalences and contradictions embedded in the memorialisation of the Gulag in Georgia; in particular, the repressions that occurred during the Great Terror of 1937–1938. This story in particular visually encapsulates the multitemporal dimensions of memory and what it means to have coexisting and conflicting perceptions of history, of the past, and of what should be commemorated, remembered, or forgotten, as well as the repercussions these conflicting memories entail in the processes of remembering and forgetting.