If I had to talk about my recent achievements
	Kristina Norman

	I would probably start with the video Contact, completed at the end of 2005. I have become almost an eternal MA student in the Academy’s Fine Arts faculty, and I did this work in Marco Laimre’s course on political art. I have to admit that it would not have occurred to me for a long time (or ever) to make art with political content. My earlier interest was connected with fiction based on scientific facts, for example my diploma work, the pseudo-documentary study film The Field of Genius, or a later series of drawings about the mystical invention of the radio, Mysterious Radio. The common denominator in these projects (and of some later works) was the phenomenon of parallel realities. My next stage was supposed to tackle my Alter Ego living in a parallel universe, and that would have continued my line of research in the field of parallel realities, only on a more personal level. Because of the afore-mentioned course, I continued the line from an unexpectedly different angle. I suddenly realized that I had been living between two social parallel realities – that of Estonians and that of Estonian Russian speakers.
	In my video Contact, a young Russian man without citizenship emerges from the Citizenship and Migration Board building, takes his brand new grey passport (alien’s passport) from his pocket and opens it at the photograph page. The picture comes to life and begins, with enormous difficulty, to read the Estonian-language Aliens’ Act, stating his rights and his duties. It is obvious that the words the young man is pronouncing mean as much to him as would words in the language of Martians or the inhabitants of Venus. The video uses the music of the French progressive rock band Magma from the 1970s, who sing in the improvised language of Martians.
	This is not meant as a mockery of Russian speakers in Estonia, as I could well be the protagonist here. I am of mixed blood myself, finished a Russian secondary school, and had my first contact with cultivated Estonian language during university. In 1997 I had to pass the language test to obtain Estonian citizenship. I cannot now clearly determine my national identity; I only know that I belong in the Estonian cultural space.
	In my next video, an hour-long documentary in guerilla-style about people in the Baltic countries (The Pribalts), I examine a group of friends made up of four of my classmates from secondary school, all boys, and our young teacher. I try to find out their identity. One of them, Seryozha Shchedrin, went to study in Russia immediately after graduation, and is now an actor at the Moscow Mayakovski Theatre. When he lived in Estonia, having been born here as well, Seryozha was an alien, and now in his ethnic homeland, he feels like an alien again. Seryozha dreams of becoming famous in Moscow and then returning to Tallinn, thus raising the level of the local Russian culture as the Chief Director of the Russian Theatre. The other Seryozha – Postnikov – lives in Tallinn and has become a lawyer. Lyosha (Aleksei Günter) is a journalist at the daily newspaper Postimees. Dima Tsaryov is a social worker at a shelter for the homeless. Karpovich (the teacher) is now a businessman. Lyosha and Seryozha Postnikov are examples of successful integration, as they speak fluent Estonian and feel like genuine members of Estonian society. The others, however, live in a parallel reality, where there has, so far, been no direct need for the Estonian language; Karpovich claimed he had no incentive to learn it before taking up business. In order to film Seryozha Shchedrin, I travelled to Moscow for the first time in my life, and there Seryozha and I found ourselves caught in an underground accident soon after we had arrived by train. As I had my camera with me, I filmed the events under ground. The Russian TV channel RTR later bought this material from me. The material was the basis for reportage seen by people in all the territories of the former Soviet Union. I used part of the programme in my own film. As we were lucky to get on television, the media thus became one of the recurrent elements of the film. In Moscow I examined the spreading stereotypes about Estonia, and the role of the media in shaping Estonia’s reputation in Russia. For example, the fact that Estonia is mostly known as a fascist country is quite paradoxical because, at the same time, the Moscow right-wing extremists hold meetings in the streets, and do not exactly hide their Nazi attitudes in front of the cameras.
	The film The Pribalts was completed last spring, when the hysteria about the bronze soldier had not yet travelled across the borders of our country. Since 22 September I have been tackling the topic of the purposeful polarising of Estonian society, connected with the media bubble created around the so-called ‘bronze soldier’, a soviet memorial in the centre of Tallinn*. It seems that the topic is about to influence the interstate relationship between Russia and Estonia. * The monument is dedicated to the anniversary of the so-called liberation of Tallinn by Soviet troops in 22 September 1944 that for local people meant the continuation of Soviet occupation in Estonia [Ed]
	| Estonian Art 2/06 (19) | Published by the Estonian Institute 2006 | ISSN 1406-5711 (Online) | ISSN 1406-3549 (Printed version) | einst@einst.ee | tel: (372) 631 43 55 | fax: (372) 631 43 56 |