Kristina Norman, Poetic Investigations. – “After-War”. Exhibit in the Estonian pavilion at the 53rd International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia. Tallinn: Center for Contemporary Arts, Estonia, 2009:

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In 1997, I graduated from one of the Russian-speaking high schools in Tallinn, and just recently I happened to discuss the events of the so-called Bronze Night and the amount of Russian schoolchildren rioting on the streets of Tallinn, chanting “Russia, Russia!”, with my high school history teacher Yevgeny Samohvalov. He thought that the young Russian-speaking generation living in Estonia today is going through a deep crisis of values. Work at school has made him realize that today the schools no longer teach history as a scientific discipline. The sole purpose of a teacher has become checking whether the children know the dates and events documented in the history books. The teachers are no longer expected to teach children to form their own opinions and make judgments based on facts. However, it is understandable that the only knowledge and value judgements that really matter are those that a person has formed by him- or herself. Due to all of this, Yevgeny decided to give up his job.

In my family we speak both Estonian and Russian – and none of us knows exactly what our nationality is. As a child I was sent to Russian school, because both of my parents had graduated from a Russian school and they never even considered sending their daughter to an Estonian educational facility. On the other hand, I remember vividly how my parents so emotionally supported the Popular Front of Estonia (Rahvarinne) during the transgression period of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and that my mother used to have heated discussions in the evenings with our Russian neighbour who was a member of Intermovement (Интердвижение). I remember how we participated in the referendum with all our family in March 1991 and we all voted for the restoration of the independence of Estonia. In the same year my sister Arina, five years younger than me, went to first grade. One could feel the Estonian spirit gain more and more power every day. Our family too agreed to “eat potato peels”  as long as we get our own state.

Since then, I have wondered what kind of person I would be, if I had graduated from an Estonian school. Maybe I’d have received Estonian citizenship more easily and I’d never have seen the "alien’s" passport. Maybe I’d have become a “real” Estonian and I’d never have had to take the language exam. But in the newly independent Estonia one had to prove one’s “Estonian-ness” with necessary documents or by taking a language exam and by testing one’s knowledge of the constitution of the republic. My papers are not much to be desired, because I had graduated from a Russian school. It was an unforgettable experience: to sit this exam along with crying and desperate Russian babushkas, for whom the hope of passing the exam was clearly unreal – it was not an easy task for an elderly person to learn a language with 14 cases by force.

Yet I didn’t become a “real” Russian either in the Russian school because when people went to take flowers to the Bronze Soldier on the 9 May, I always stayed at home or went for a walk in the city. The monument square and its associations remained a stranger for me. I didn’t consider it important to take flowers to the mass grave of unknown people because my grandfather, who had fought in the Red Army, has a grave in the cemetery and every year we’d go to light candles there on All Saints’ Day.

I’ve never been totally accepted – neither in the Russian high school nor in the school of art where I went with Estonian kids. For Russians, I was an Estonian, and for Estonians I was a Russian. It is still like that.

This is my artistic stance

Years after my graduation from high school, I turned back to my childhood experiences, and memories became an object of research for me. The video installation “Contact” (Kontakt, 2005) deals with the phenomenon of the alien’s passports valid in Estonia, as well as with the people who own them. The name of the project implies similar titles used for sci-fi films and so on. However, it is ironic that this sci-fi word “alien” describes rather well the status of those people in the country and society in which they live. The main character of the video is a young man, about my age, who has a Russian background, but who was born in Estonia; he studied English linguistics at the university, but he never learnt Estonian. He works as a customer care assistant in a wholesale warehouse, where the owner and most of the clients are also Russian. He doesn’t need Estonian at work and he manages really well without speaking the official language of the state. As far as Estonian society is concerned, he lives in a parallel reality. In the video Contact this so-called alien is reading the Estonian Aliens Act out aloud – a document that regulates his status, obligations and rights. The video is equipped with Estonian subtitles because for this young man reading and pronouncing words in a foreign language is incomprehensibly difficult.
In the documentary “The Pribalts”(Прибалты, 2006), I explore via my former schoolmates – whom I last met almost ten years ago because since being accepted into the Estonian Academy of Arts I have mainly communicated with Estonians – how a “real” Russian lives in contemporary Estonia and whether this “real” Russian even exists. I also asked my old classmate Sergey these questions. Sergey went to study in Russia right after graduating from high school, and has become a young star actor at the Mayakovsky theatre in Moscow. As he was an “alien” by passport in Estonia, he decided to go to his ethnic home country only to discover that he is an alien there as well. In Moscow, Sergey has obtained Russian citizenship and he communicates with people in his mother tongue, but he hasn’t fitted in completely. Sergey says that his dream is to become famous in Moscow and then to return to Tallinn and ameliorate the state of Russian culture in the city where he was born.

The experimental film, “Monolith” (Monoliit, 2007), was originally supposed to be a documentary that would give equal liberty of speech to both sides participating in the Bronze Soldier conflict, and would reveal the emotional, historical and political meaning of the monument for both communities living side by side in Estonia. I started shooting the film in autumn 2006, when the monument drama was just beginning. However, as the conflict escalated I understood that a situation where the “event” is being constructed and where it is getting too big to grasp should be approached from “outside” not “inside”. Otherwise there’s some threat that I will simply start defending one of those putative truths and choose a side in this invented conflict. The absurd has to be approached in an absurd key. Monolith was born as a paraphrase of Stanley Kubrick’s famous film “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968). In my film, the Bronze Soldier is a monolith that comes from outer space and lands on Earth, more specifically Tallinn, and the society here is now forced to relate to this new alien object. Some people decide to worship this object with its cosmic origins; others choose to fight it. This process would lead to a conflict that cannot have a positive solution. In the film, indomitable natural forces solve the situation because human beings would continue to argue about the “truth” until the end of their existence.
Even though people in artistic circles were familiar with my interest in identity creation thanks to my earlier project, Monolith earned me mostly criticism. I was told that I hadn’t chosen an artistic stance and that the film doesn’t explain whose side I am on in this conflict. It appears that not choosing a side is not a stand!

I got the idea for the After-War project for the 53rd International Art Exhibition in Venice from an experiment I organized in Tallinn on the 9 May 2008. As I was intrigued by the question of the sacral and the profane in the context of the Bronze Soldier, I carried out an experiment as an artist. I made a small number of miniature plaster cast copies of the Bronze Soldier and took them to the Defence Forces Cemetery in central Tallinn. This is the new location of the monument, and where the members of Russian-speaking community had again gathered together to celebrate Victory Day. The purpose of this action was to find out whether small copies of the Bronze Soldier could have some new extra meanings that differ from those of the real one? I wanted to know how much the semantic field of the souvenir format of these figurines would or could match that of the real monument itself? And whether people would agree to exchange money for a miniature representation of the Bronze Soldier?

It was a very interesting experience to talk to the people gathered at the statue in the cemetery. Some of them were positively surprised at seeing me with those figurines. One older man advised me to make more, but a little smaller, so that I would become “really rich” by selling them cheaply. It was evident that my artefacts delighted many people and they were ready to obtain them – some for money, some with wit and some by evoking pity. Others, however, recognized in me “the notorious agent-provoker from the newspaper Postimees” who came to the holy territory on a holy day to use unethical and staged journalistic methods in order to create a negative public image of the local Russians for the Estonian people. 

As an artist I carried out a symbolical act: I took the representation of the monument from the sacred sphere that the community had created around it, and positioned it in the daily, profane sphere. A paradox is written inside all of this – it is like selling cheap copies of icon masterpieces in ersatz frames. Small copies of icons have a certain function in daily life, or the profane sphere – with their help people create an environment where they can carry out religious acts daily without having to go to church.

It turned out that one of the miniatures I had handed out in the cemetery was taken to Tõnismäe, to the previous location of the monument. The evening news on the national television network showed how somebody had lit a candle in front of the small Bronze Soldier, symbolizing the eternal flame, and how people were bringing flowers to this installation. As an artist, I had all of a sudden given the community an impulse that gave its members an idea for how to re-sacralize the place that had been claimed profane by the government a year earlier. The meaningful void of the monument’s previous location was filled by the miniature copy of the symbol that had previously been standing there.

The action on the 9 May 2009 – artist’s suggestion for a new cultural practice – is a sort of mimetic gesture documented and shown at the exhibition in Venice. I am reflecting the reaction of the community to my impulse of the previous year. I am now suggesting a new physical expression for the community, with their clear desire to bring together the previous and current locations of the monument. I prepare a full-scale golden copy of the Bronze Soldier and make it go through a symbolic route of passion, repeating its journey from its previous location to the new one. I am accentuating and poetizing the invisible, I am making it visible by giving the empty square as well as its new place in the military cemetery a semantic meaning. Here I am stressing that the behaviour of the artist and the community are tautologically different. This shift not only takes place due to the visual transmutation of the “hijacked” model of actions (the community takes a small replica of the monument to Tõnismäe, but the artist does it with full-scale copy, etc), but also thanks to the different positions from which these actions are fulfilled.
For the Russian community, taking a small replica of the monument to its previous location was kind of an attempt to return “confiscated instruments” to their comrades, so that they could, in a dignified manner, celebrate the victory of the Great Patriotic War. I am demonstrating that the community needs such instruments in order to practise their communal and national identity rituals of intensification. As an artist, I am deliberately intervening in reality and distorting it. I am not only acting inside the existing reality, and I am also not involved in recreating it. I am trying to provoke and evoke the emergence of different points of view. By creating a golden full-scale copy of the Bronze Soldier and carrying out a ritual known from church practices, I am highlighting the religious substance of the rituals practiced by the Russian community in Estonia. With my action I am not only targeting the Russian community, who practices those rituals, but also this Other, who has, via technocratic means and methods, violently intruded into something that they really don’t have a clue about. The traditions of the people who always gathered at the Tõnismäe monument have always been described with scorn in Estonian media, because the “dancing on graves” and “eating and vodka drinking” have always caused disdain among Estonians – representatives of a different culture. The sacredness of these rituals performed by Russians was not understood in Estonia, and nobody even wanted to begin to understand them. There was no code to help decipher the information obtained by the simple visual observation of the other community. There still isn’t. The purpose of my artistic practice is to take over the code-generating machines and program mistakes in them, so that none of the existing ciphers could be mechanically used to read the cultural texts.
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