Festive Spaces

Overview

The audio-visual piece titled “Festive Spaces” is a contemplation on the production of ideological spaces and their use in different temporal and ideological contexts. It is a lecture-performance staged in the assembly hall of a Soviet-time school building in Tallinn. With the participation of pupils of Russian-language schools, the piece deconstructs a media scandal concerning a class photograph taken in a hall of the History Museum of Estonia as part of the ritual of the inauguration of the first graders of one of the Russian schools in Tallinn. According to the National Broadcasting, taking pictures on the background of the mural “Friendship of Nations” (1987) by an acknowledged Estonian painter Evald Okas has an anti-Estonian undertone, as the iconography of the mural depicts Soviet symbols and subjects.