Evelina Gambino is an independent researcher and activist, member of a number of collectives, in London and Italy. She has completed her undergraduate and MA degrees at Goldsmiths College, University of London and she is now about to start her PhD with a specific focus of urban regeneration in Tbilisi and the new forms of dissent, which it has sparkled. Her research practice is concerned with urban struggles connecting the diverse subjectivities of migrants, citizens, and other precarious subjects, within and against the theoretical framework of the right to the city. In 2012 alongside a group of militants from the Italian network Campagnein Lotta (Fields of Struggle) she has created the militant research collective Collettivo RicercAzione, devoted to the exploration of new forms of collective theorization of the practices of struggle experimented by the network. Since then militant research has been the thread connecting her different theoretical and practical interests. Shifting her main focus from migration to housing struggles, Evelina has recently been active in the London-based Radical Housing Network  from which she has drawn her interest in the analysis of new class formations emerging in the neoliberal metropolis.

As a researcher at GeoAIR residency, Evelina was exploring the different forms of struggle emerged in Tbilisi in the last decade and reflect on the ways the visual arts have played a key role in giving an international resonance to the pillaging of Tbilisi’s public infrastructure, while at the same time attempting to explore the relation between social engagement of public art and activism in the city.

Evelina will reflect on these issues firstly through an exploration of the material sites of the city’s current renovation, this will be achieved through the psycho-geographical methodology of the urban transect, an investigative walk around a pre-defined area of the city, successively the inquiry will focus on the vast material collected in GeoAIR’s archive (ARCHIDROME) which will offer the basis for a genealogy of artists’ concern with Tbilisi’s metamorphosis.