“In 1994 Irakli Charkviani, Lado Burduli, several other musicians and I went to Koln to record Svan Song, Irakli’s first album. Today all songs from the album are hits but in those days it was a near impossible project: we were in a respectable European studio. After the recording, I visited my friend Luka Tsuladze in Paris whose younger brother Gela had his own studio.

“Earlier, Irakli and I had read our poetry in Berlin. We had translated several poems into German, which later Gela and I made into a 48-page book in Paris. Last year, after Luka’s death, Gela brought the whole archive to Tbilisi, so the poetry book came back to me. I was glad to have it back because those are my first poems, reflecting our city of the 1990s.

“As for the title, I chose it because it echoes Tato Kotetishvili and Inke Smith’s film: made in the 1990s, it precisely shows what was happening in Georgia at the time while I read poems and told about the events against the documentary footage.”