Elene's Lines of Flight, developed by Natia Chikvaidze, Davit Khorbaladze, and Karolina Sobel, is part of an artistic exchange between the UNESCO Creative Cities of Media Arts Karlsruhe and Tbilisi. Based on the Georgian painter Elene Akhvlediani (1901–1975), whose multifaceted life and work resist easy narrative categorization, the project explores questions of queer and feminist visibility, absence in archives, and the historical conditions of silence—asking how stories fade, disintegrate, or remain untold.

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The performance combines dance, text, and live music, moving between two periods in Akhvlediani's life: her years in Paris, when her painting focused primarily on female nudes, and the landscapes that shaped her artistic practice and identity after her return to Soviet Georgia.

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As far as it is known, Akhvlediani no longer publicly painted female nudes after returning from Paris. Yet something seems to persist between those bodies and the landscapes that followed: a continuity of line, gesture, rhythm, and gaze. The landscapes form traces rather than evidence—places where identity dissolves, transforms, and survives through displacement.

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Very little of Akhvlediani's personal correspondence has survived, even in existing archives. Instead, fragments of memory, anecdotes, and second-hand recollections remain. One such story became an important point of departure for the performance, serving as an abstract narrative layer.

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​According to this recollection, while sitting at Café Rotonde in Paris, Akhvlediani became captivated by the striking violet eyes and gaze of a woman she encountered there. They never met again. Much later, after watching Camille, Akhvlediani realized that the woman had been the actress Greta Garbo. From that moment on, she reportedly watched the film around 118 times. Whether factual or embellished, this story became, for us, a space around which fantasies, projections, desire, and acts of seeing begin to accumulate—where affection, longing, and imagination remain suspended between memory and invention.