Laura Collard

Across Georgia, local communities are protesting against the privatization and exploitation of their land. In Chiatura, a mono-industrial city in western Georgia, miners are fighting against an extractive company. In Balda, also located in the West, villagers are denouncing the corrupt leasing of their village canyon — a supposedly protected natural monument — by a state agency to a private company.

In recent years, local struggles from this South Caucasus republic have begun to unite around a broader critique of their country’s chosen economic path, which is causing the destruction of nature and the collapse of their homes in the name of development and profit. The people of Chiatura and Balda are supporting one another, sharing lawyers’ contacts, strategies, and tools to stand up to private companies and a complicit government. They do so in a political context where protests are increasingly being repressed, and where they are facing constant silence, and often violence and discredit from the authorities.

The project « Then sell the air, too! » is a portrait of this resistance, photographed in March 2025. It is the result of a collaboration between Laura Collard and Inés Verheyleweghen and was made possible thanks to the support of the Journalism Fund of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation. 

The series was selected as ANI's [Association Nationale des Iconographes] 2025 "coups de coeur".