In a city where concrete remembers more than it reveals, where Soviet housing blocks still carry the afterimage of planned lives and deferred futures, the appearance of two girls lifting a plant toward the sky feels less like decoration and more like an intervention. The work, created by the Italian artist Edoardo Ettorre during the Tbilisi Mural Fest, has now been ranked third in the Street Art Cities Expert Choice Awards 2025, a distinction that places it within a curated European conversation about what public art is allowed to do today: soothe, provoke, or quietly rewire perception.
The facts are straightforward. Twenty-five murals were shortlisted. Experts and artists selected a top five. Spain took first place, France second; Cyprus and Belgium completed the list. Tbilisi, unexpectedly and yet somehow inevitably, landed at number three. But the ranking is the least interesting part of the story.
The mural sits in Vazisubani, specifically, the first microdistrict, building 17, a location that resists easy romanticization. This is not the postcard Tbilisi of balconies and sulfur baths. It is a lived-in, infrastructural Tbilisi: repetitive facades, pragmatic architecture, the quiet choreography of everyday survival. To place a work here is already a statement.
Two girls: one standing on a chair, the other steadying her. Between them, a plant—fragile, vertical, almost absurdly hopeful. The gesture is ambiguous: are they placing it on the roof, saving it, elevating it, or simply playing? The ambiguity is the point. The mural resists narrative closure and instead constructs a small ethical field: cooperation, balance, care.
In a city where public space has often been contested, politically, economically, symbolically, the act of lifting a plant together reads as a minor utopia.
European street art, particularly in its festivalized form, has long been tempted by monumentality: scale as legitimacy, visibility as value. What distinguishes Ettorre’s work is its refusal to equate size with noise.
Yes, the mural is large—it occupies the full vertical plane of a residential block—but its emotional register is deliberately quiet. There is no irony, no overt political slogan, no visual aggression. Instead, the work leans into what might be called domestic transcendence: the idea that care, enacted in small gestures, can acquire architectural significance.
This is where the mural aligns, subtly, with a broader shift in contemporary public art. The most compelling works of the past decade have moved away from declarative messaging toward affective atmospheres: spaces that change how one feels before they change what one thinks.
That this work emerges from the Tbilisi Mural Fest is not incidental. Over the past years, the festival has functioned as a kind of soft urban laboratory, testing how international street art languages can be translated into the specific textures of Georgian life.
The results have been uneven, as such experiments tend to be. Some murals feel imported, aesthetically fluent yet contextually detached. Others, like Ettorre’s, achieve a rare equilibrium: they speak in a global visual idiom while remaining deeply attentive to local spatial psychology.
Vazisubani, with its layered histories and understated resilience, becomes not just a backdrop but a collaborator. The mural does not overwrite the building; it enters into a conversation with it.
It would be easy, too easy, to read the mural as a simple ecological allegory: children caring for a plant, a symbol of environmental awareness. And certainly, that reading is available.
But in the context of contemporary Georgia, where questions of public space, civic responsibility, and collective action remain urgent, the image acquires additional resonance. The plant becomes less a symbol of nature than a proxy for shared responsibility: something precarious that requires cooperation to survive. The girls are not heroic. They are careful. This distinction matters.
In an era saturated with grand narratives and ideological overstatements, the mural proposes a different model of engagement: care as a form of quiet resistance. To lift, to steady, to support: these are minor actions, almost invisible in political discourse. Yet here they are monumentalized, given scale and permanence.
Awards, especially in the ecosystem of global street art, often function as both validation and flattening. They create visibility, but they also risk standardizing what is, by nature, a site-specific and context-dependent practice.
That Tbilisi has entered this ranking signals a shift in how the city is perceived: not merely as a recipient of cultural imports, but as an active participant in shaping contemporary visual culture.
And yet, the true success of Ettorre’s mural cannot be measured by its position in a list. It is measured in slower, less quantifiable ways: in how residents pass by it daily, in how children might recognize themselves in it, in how the building, once anonymous, now carries a story.
Ultimately, what remains is the gesture itself. Two figures, a plant, an upward movement. In a city defined by its vertical tensions, between past and future, center and periphery, memory and reinvention, the mural offers a simple proposition: that elevation does not require force. It can be achieved through balance, through cooperation, through the careful distribution of weight. And in the quiet courtyards of Vazisubani, that may be the most radical image of all.
By Ivan Nechaev
