Kera: Night of the Fireflies

The installation Night of the Fireflies by Kera architects weaves together two intertwined forms of quiet disappearance: the vanishing of fireflies under habitat loss, light pollution, and climate change, and the decay of Georgian vernacular architecture driven by industrialization, rural decline, and the erosion of traditional craftsmanship. Together, they reveal how cultural, social, and ecological knowledge vanish under modern pressures.

The global decline of fireflies has become a subtle symbol of environmental degradation. Once common on summer nights, their glow is fading under pressures from habitat loss, pesticides, and especially expanding artificial light. Fireflies rely on darkness, humidity, and intact wetlands or meadows for their courtship signals and life cycles, yet urbanization and industrial agriculture fragment and pollute these habitats. Light pollution further disrupts mating by drowning their bioluminescent signals in constant glare. Climate change worsens the crisis by altering temperatures, rainfall, and hibernation patterns. This gradual disappearance is both ecological and cultural, severing a sensory connection between people and the natural world and revealing how modern brightness, noise, and speed have displaced the quiet darkness that once allowed them to thrive.

The fading of Georgian vernacular architecture signals the breakdown of a way of life once rooted in land, materials, and community. For centuries, stone and timber homes, courtyards, and shared balconies evolved from local knowledge and agricultural rhythms. Soviet industrialization disrupted this continuity, replacing regionally distinctive forms with standardized housing and factory settlements. After independence, unregulated extractive industries further reshaped landscapes and emptied villages, severing ties between people and place. As rural populations declined, the craftsmen who sustained these traditions disappeared, leaving buildings to decay—not as isolated buildings, but as an entire system of living. What remains is a landscape of fragments: traces of a cultural order displaced by industrial progress.

Kera is an architectural practice founded by Sandro Bakhtadze, Kote Gunia, and Beka Gujejiani in Tbilisi, Georgia. The name derives from the Georgian word “kera” (კერა), meaning “hearth,” a term with no single definition that can signify home, family, the fire at the heart of a traditional Georgian house, or a small source that radiates outward. The concept of kera echoes across cultures and time, representing a way of living rooted in the human desire to define and enclose a place of dwelling. In the spirit of Eastern philosophy, kera is understood not as the house itself or the walls that shape it, but as the space between them—alive with human presence. This idea forms the foundation of the practice’s name and reflects its pursuit of expressing local forms of living through architectural language.

Kera has been the winner of the Tbilisi Architecture Biennial 2024 Open Call (Physical Projects category) with their installation Cenotaph, which is currently nominated for the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture / Mies van der Rohe Awards 2026.

The installation is a way of reflection on the idea of fading knowledge, the inevitable consumption of cultural and architectural identity in the name of progress and the impact of the current form of living on the natural habitat, with the focus on the fireflies being on the brink of extinction in the Anthropocene.