From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
The Saitsavlebi Unfinishing
This work features and is co-created with the Saitsavlebi vocal ensemble. For the ensemble itself, see Saitsavlebi Vocal Ensemble.
A seven-hour vocal ritual cycle using Georgian traditional polyphony as a framework for exploring the doctrine of refusal and sacred incompleteness. Participants (both trained singers and first-time singers) sit in concentric circles and learn to sustain interlocking vocal lines derived from traditional saitsavlebi forms, reworked to emphasize the frequencies that resist resolution—the unfinishing of harmonic closure.
The ensemble treats each sung interval as a refusal to resolve in the Western functional-harmony sense. The work draws explicitly from Smith's *Subject* essay on Möbius consciousness: singers are guided to experience the one-sided surface where "the gap is you." As cycles progress across weeks, participants report synesthetic experiences (seeing colors shift with frequency changes) and encounters with the Kármán resonance—a low, dissonant undertone that emerges only after sustained singing.
The work has spawned The Saitsavlebi Meridian, an olfactory icon-panel cycle, and The Saitsavlebi Unfinishing—A Participatory Choral Installation and Durational Refusal Vigil in Tbilisi, Georgia, a scholarly documentation.