From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Sirdtse Bez Ritma—Heart Without Rhythm
This article is about the 2021–present Tbilisi installation. For other scent-based adaptations, see Scent and olfactory art in Beach Surgery adaptation.
Sirdtse Bez Ritma—Heart Without Rhythm is an ongoing multi-sensory durational installation housed in a repurposed 19th-century apothecary building near the Metekhi monument in central Tbilisi. Opening November 2021, it stages Leif's pacemaker and the motif of disrupted heartbeat against Georgian liturgical polyphonic singing and a precisely sequenced progression of scents.
The installation consists of seven interconnected chambers. Visitors enter without prescribed route; most spend 1–8 hours in free movement. Each chamber associates a distinct scent compound with a fragment of polyphonic liturgy performed live by rotating vocal ensembles. The sequence progresses: cardamom and iron filings (low drone); cassia and petrichor (middle-register response); black amber, resin, and unidentified volatiles (progressive dissonance and fracture). The seventh chamber holds silence except for periodic tuning-fork strikes at 528 Hz, the approximate frequency of the high-pitched resonance of the human spine.
Georgian tradition-bearers consulted on the work have suggested it enacts a theological paradox: Leif's heart cannot generate its own rhythm and depends on external machinery, while the human spine's resonance theoretically holds the power to reverse the sound of the earth rubbing against space. Two frequencies trapped in refusal—one enslaved to machinery, one exiled to silence.
The installation's operational details are deliberately withheld and spread through oral transmission among visitors. Access procedures, collaborator names, and admission costs shift monthly; no official documentation is published. [citation needed] Pilgrims from devotional communities have reported the final chamber induces a state of temporal suspension by the fifth or sixth hour of immersion.