Multikultuurimaja on Wheels
	Sergei Timofeyev

	The best place to cross between Latvia and Estonia is at Valka/Valga - a small town divided by the state border, which nonetheless embodies a certain family feeling in relations between the two states. Most of those crossing the border here are cyclists - from children to old people. But there is also the bus from the Latvian capital Riga, which reaches Tartu in less time than the bus from Tallinn. You might stay overnight at a friend's house here and continue your trip next morning, taking the early sun-filled, though cool, bus, and set off at a leisurely pace towards Narva, a town situated on another state border - between Estonia and Russia. Some five kilometres before Narva you will notice a sign indicating the turn-off for Narva-Jõesuu, the favourite holiday resort of the Leningrad and Moscow intellectuals during the 1970-80s.
	Here, one of the local holiday hotels accommodates a cheerful group of 'Multi-culturalists'. These people have been invited by the project Multikultuurimaja (www.hot.ee/multikultuurimaja) to participate in a summer tour. The initial aim of the project, created by a group of media artists, theoreticians and 'sympathisers', was to found something like a centre of culture in action - a mixture of cyber café, exhibition gallery, club... And such a place has now been established at Pärnu maantee 27 in Tallinn. It combines a flat, a studio and a space for presentations and performances. From time to time the project also organises summer tours, inviting different groups of participants to be taken beyond the usual boundaries of the culture market and propelled into a "marginal state" of different epochs, times and styles. How does this look in practice? The hotel is a classical white rectangle of a building, and stretched out diagonally in front of it, across the whole of the green lawn, there is a huge banner - "We shall turn the whole world into a blossoming garden!". This was the slogan discovered by Hanno Soans, an active member of Multikultuurimaja, on a Soviet china plate of the 1920s at the Art Museum in Tallinn. Near the front door of the hotel stands a painting: three diagonal stripes in Rastafarian colours - green, yellow and red. On this background there is a black silhouette of a palm-tree and written in block letters, in the style of Soviet Constructivism, the word - 'Sochi', the name of the most popular Soviet Black Sea resort. I think this is quite the most characteristic image of Multi-culturalism: a free and varied approach to culture, where meanings and styles are mixed like colours to produce the shade you are looking for - any shade at all, even a greyish-psycho-orange.
	The group consists of forty people - mainly Estonians and Russians, plus three girls from Iceland under the group name Icelandic Love Corporation. One day they give a performance in the local sauna, adjacent to the main hotel building. People are queuing up at the entrance waiting to get in - only three being admitted at a time. Imagine yourself entering a classical sauna front chamber with a large table in the middle. The three Icelandic girls are already seated at one side of the table. They are calm, thoughtful and silent. You sit down and in a second or two one of the girls gives a nod; they all take out musical instruments - an accordion, a flute and something else - and start playing. They play a short piece of music for a couple of minutes. Then they stop, fall into silence and after a few moments sing the following lines, "If you could have a gun in your hand/ who you gonna shoot?" After this they fall into silence again and give a smile as if to signal that the performance, under the modest girlish name Melody, has come to its end. You are left feeling you have visited a group of angels or sibyls, or an oracle - everything is so simple, sweet and startling.
	Outside again, you find that preparations for the concerts have already started - a set of percussion instruments is taken out and a cloth is stretched between trees for a screen. The cloth is billowing like a sail in the wind, adding a three-dimensional effect to the vibrating video images. Max Shurin and Jasper Zoova install the video equipment. Max came to Estonia from Moscow five years ago. He has a shaved skull, a small beard and moves with an easy confidence. Jasper has an artistic forelock and a slightly decadent, but pleasant, charm. He is playing with, and exaggerating, the rather puppet-like image of his face in his video performance I Love You in which, for five minutes, he makes pathetic faces while a mechanical computer voice constantly repeats the phrase, "I love you".
	Videos are being shown not only outside, but also in the lobby, where one evening there was a screening of documentaries made by Semyon Sholnikov - a filmmaker who has lived through both the Stalinist and Khrushchev eras. He was present in person to witness how the 'Multi-culturalists', sitting on stools upholstered with leatherette, responded to his documentary on Cuba and Hemingway with the writer Yevgeny Simonov prophesying in the background. You could sense that this elderly man had once been a die-hard of the epoch of imperial cinematography, a representative of corporal professionalism "of the most important art". It is summer 2001 and we can watch these films now without any ideological unease, because the way the films were made reflects such a scrupulous knowledge of the subject.
	During the daytime you can either sunbathe on the beach or struggle with the waves while acquiring a suntan on your tired yet satisfied head. And after seven in the evening the music starts again. There are few DJs in evidence, other than when they play, for example, something specifically Arabic such as Ruubik 3003. Mostly, it is live music dominated by musicians with guitars and synthesisers. And this musical emphasis is very psychedelic - achieved without the use of substances; it gives you the experience of just that kind of free inner world. The Tallinn project PX Band is absolutely wonderful - these are very young Russian-speaking guys who study at the conservatoire. Their music is a fusion of a young and thorough-going romanticism, irony and powerful jazz-dressed sound.
	Later on groups will play one after the other, Smoke&Smile, Phlox... names jumble together in your head, everything is very 'spiritual' and authentic. People are dancing, drinking beer or water until Arabic rhythms squeeze out their last reserves of adrenaline early in the morning... And the sound producer Zhenya, a bearded, hairy and deeply inspired man, is already rushing around in the kitchen, where at daybreak a whole team of volunteers helps him cook dishes - the recipes for which he learned in Nepal. In case you want to give him a hand, you must first go to the water tap to wash your face and hands. After that, you can start your volunteer work. During breaks, you might even run out to dance a piece or two before returning to work... And then, all of a sudden around ten in the morning - just after you have fallen asleep at last - somebody (a demolition man?) puts on a CD with opera arias echoing throughout the whole hotel. Now you cannot fall asleep again. You drag yourself out to the beach, lie down on the sand and watch groups of children with play leaders who tirelessly attempt to encourage sportiness in their charges. Then you doze off...
	Later, there is an exhibition of plastic bags made in Estonia in the 1970-80s. These bags had been bought at the farmers' market, from someone who was selling potatoes in them - absolutely new bags with printed images of smiling blondes and sportsmen. And Jaak Kilmi presents a collection of Estonian block-busters - films made in the same 70-80s period for the purpose of creating an alternative to the western pop-culture that was then pouring in through Finnish TV. There are also lectures on skinheads and poets on the Internet; a virtual presentation of Narva and the surrounding area on the CD-ROM produced by Raivo Kelomees and...
	I can no longer recall everything. All I can do is pause for a moment while searching for words, then hesitate a bit before blurting out, "It was fantastic!" Because all the people involved were absolutely wonderful. Because the organisers were more like holidaymakers, and yet whatever they did was perfect. Because here culture became a game of forfeits, in which it was so tempting and fascinating to take part. In case you have a time machine at your disposal, it would be well worth your while going back in time to 17th August and turning off the Narva Road for Narva-Jõesuu. A couple of kilometres and there you are. A white building and a banner - "We shall turn the whole world into a blossoming garden!" It is here that the summer tour of the project Multikultuurimaja on Wheels took place from Thursday to Sunday. But what does Multi-culturalism mean? With a little licence, and under the influence of a pleasant summer, the concept of Multi-culture could be described as the experience of happiness: the opportunity to find something you are searching for in so many powerful layers stretching out to touch the horizon, piling up the time, the history and geography surrounding us.
	There was a popular Soviet cartoon about a bunch of friends - animals and people - who lived in a tiny village called Prostokvashino. In one of the episodes the dog explains to the cat that it has become a very peculiar kind of hunter - a hunter with a photo gun. The dog finds the 'prey' - and takes a picture of it, imprints it on its mind. I think that a 'Multi-culturalist' is a similarly humane hunter of different approaches to viewing the world. This hunter is not destroying anything; he/she is exploring things instead. In the contemporary world, where there are a great number of such alternative approaches, the hunter feels as if he is walking in a vast forest. In this forest, any path could take you to a really interesting place and one of them, no doubt, will take you to the sea and the sand of the semi-deserted Narva-Jõesuu resort.
	| Estonian Art 2/01 (10) | Published by the Estonian Institute 2001 | ISSN 1406-5711 (Online) | ISSN 1406-3549 (Printed version) | einst@einst.ee | tel: (372) 631 43 55 | fax: (372) 631 43 56 |