Still from BORN FROM CULTURE | Georgia
By Perry Shimon
For some unknown and largely algorithmic reason, I’ve been getting served a series of videos made in former Soviet countries in the Caucasus region and nearby, featuring dancing troupes performing elaborate choreographies of cultural heritage to the soundtrack of Future’s trap anthem “Mask Off.”
The videos are fascinating in a way that seems calibrated to our dopaminergic media environment, filled with striking costumes, beautiful bodies, horses, mountains, jewelry, textiles, drone shots, wide angles, tight crops, and quick cuts in a distinctive register I would characterize as Hype Williams-meets-Parajanov.
The trend is called Born From Culture, part of a series initiated by Australian choreographer and director James Fenwick in 2026. Fenwick’s original films moved between Samoa, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and Georgia, and the format became a kind of international meme. Georgia was followed by Uzbekistan and Armenia; Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, and Sakha/Yakutia have since produced their own versions, all to the score of “Mask Off.”
The trend is proliferating quickly, and it’s becoming difficult to tell what’s real and what’s AI, with influence flowing both ways. And then, not so long after writing that last sentence, it became really clear which videos are AI. After searching “Born from Culture Mask Off” to refresh my thinking for this piece, I watched a TikTok video that was almost certainly an AI voice reading an AI-generated text on the phenomenon from the point of view of an LLM. And while suffering this banal journalistic affront, the tab I had open featuring the original Georgian version autoplayed a three-hour video featuring an AI-generated still image titled “Alpine Meadow in Bloom • Vintage Art Screensaver (4K) • Classical Oil Painting in Gold Frame (3 h).”
“A vivid classical oil painting of an alpine meadow in full bloom. Colorful wildflowers stretch toward snow-capped peaks under a bright blue sky. Presented in museum quality with ornate gold frame and timeless composition.”
The Born From Culture videos illustrate something I’ve become familiar with through contemporary art and the international biennial circuit in liberalizing contexts: the way local cultural heritage is required to perform through a globally intelligible visual language with strict formal codes determined by the market. Contemporary art asks a given place or artist to become transactionable and enter into a transnational circuit of capital while preserving just enough difference to remain legible as distinctively local. The Born From Culture videos enact this process similarly, compressing a like cultural proposition into a minute of Instagram content.
The boundary between tradition and modernity is, of course, porous and unfolding, though in these films, the distinction feels collapsed or subsumed. The dancers spectacularize or iconize aspects of their regional traditions to memetically enter a global image economy with the least amount of friction. Future’s “Mask Off” is a poignant soundtrack for this process, which we could describe as the neoliberal platforming of cultural heritage.
The song begins with the repeated invocation of Percocet and Molly, an opioid painkiller and a psychoactive stimulant and empathogen, respectively: pharmacological technologies for altering consciousness, modulating affect, and managing pain. This metronome of “Percocets, Molly, Percocets” echoes the booms and busts that characterize neoliberal capitalism and offers a fitting soundtrack for managing the attendant social and psychological maladies it invariably produces.
The Born From Culture format produces the semblance of difference through sameness. Each country is invited to exhibit itself, but according to a standardized grammar. The same soundtrack, vertical frame, cinematic transitions, ancient costumes, iconic tourist landscapes, and so on, are rendered in contemporary spectacle.
Each video invariably begins and ends with an individual distinguishing themselves from the group, which is perhaps the foundational act of the (nominally) sovereign liberal subject under neoliberal capitalism. The videos then segue into battle scenes and virtuosic dancing. The imperative seems to be that culture becomes immediately legible, transactional, emotionally intoxicating, viral, violent, and competitive, while actual cultural difference is subsumed and homogenized at the level of form.
Future’s Atlanta trap music becomes the unlikely soundtrack for Georgia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan, and Black American popular culture provides a contemporary syntax through which cultures that have themselves occupied ambiguous positions within the racial and geopolitical hierarchy of Europe and Russia announce their presence in the liberal visual space of platform capitalism. Of course, there is no equivalence between the histories of African Americans and Eastern Europeans or West Asians, nor is it possible to collapse racialized and gendered forms of subordination into imperial subordination. The resemblance is simply at the level of form, where all of these irreducible histories have produced cultures in which the spectacle, stylization, and flattening of culture can become a means of transacting attentional capital and generating subsequent forms of financialization.
An intersectional analysis suggests other uncomfortable relationships here as well. Whiteness has long functioned as a category of privilege and as a technology for dividing populations within the global hierarchy. Eastern Europeans can be racialized as provincial, backward, insufficiently European, and economically exploitable while simultaneously being invited into a proximity with whiteness that distinguishes them from populations coded as more fully outside Europe. The same ambiguity applies differently across West and Central Asia. To be “white but not quite,” as Ivan Kalmar put it, is to occupy a disadvantaged position within whiteness while simultaneously being instrumentalized in questionable national projects and racial paradigms, specifically against migrants and other populations occupying positions within core-periphery asymmetries of power.
This is one of the reasons the encounter with Black American culture in these videos is so charged. Future’s music enters spaces whose populations have themselves been subordinated by empire, racial hierarchy, and uneven development, but it does not produce an uncomplicated solidarity. Instead, it creates a strange lateral cultural alliance within the marketplace, where marginalized cultures borrow the aesthetic language of another historically marginalized culture to announce their power, and, significantly, borrow the grammar of that historically marginalized culture at the very moment of adopting a hegemonic value system associated with its oppressors. It’s also interesting to note that the flute sample in “Mask Off” was deracinated from its origin in “Prison Song,” written by Tommy Butler and performed by Carlton Williams for Butler’s 1976/78 musical Selma, about the Civil Rights Movement and Martin Luther King Jr.
The Born From Culture videos stage a fantasy of movement—liquidity, even. Filled with motion, they present images of unfixed cultural heritage moving through global virtual space as frictionless viral content. Everything in them moves quickly, a kind of visual enactment of dislocation. It also bears mentioning that a memetic video featuring traditional dance can travel much more easily than the dancer performing it might ever be able to. This is one of the most revealing contradictions of this phenomenon. Culture appears increasingly borderless at precisely a moment when human mobility is being choreographed through increasingly militarized borders.
The videos show us people who appear extraordinarily free as they move through mountains, cross landscapes, and perform identities without apparent constraint. Though outside the frame, the mobility of these populations remains profoundly unequal, with strict and punitive migration controls producing populations whose immobility becomes economically productive, providing sources of cheap labor. What appears on screen as cultural liberation and pride coexists with a sophisticated regime of human immobility.
Perhaps this is the deeper insight of the Mask Off trend. The videos offer an intoxicating vision of a world in which culture can move freely between Atlanta and Almaty and local identities can enter a common global language without losing their specificity. But this false freedom belongs to the spectacular image and to cultural capital, while the people themselves remain overwhelmingly bordered and increasingly exploited under the conditions and choreographies of neoliberalism in its now familiar, near-ubiquitous form.