Part three: Mooste and Tartu

Upon my arrival into Estonia, I had read quite a bit about the reserved nature of the Estonian people. This has held true for the people in Mooste, with one notable exception. On the first morning, I had gotten up early and quietly left MoKS to go for a walk to see what was around in Mooste. The very first person I encountered was an older woman, who seemed to be very polite but insisted on talking at me in Estonian, despite the fact that I was obviously befuddled by her language. When I returned from the walk, I made it a point to ask Evelyn how to say "I don't understand" in Estonian. It's "Ma ei saa aru" in case you too need to know of such things.

Mooste itself is a small village, with three or four Soviet-era apartment complexes, a couple dozen farmhouses, a recreational center, a school, two small shops that sell the basic staples, and a few historic buildings dating back to the 18th and 19th Centuries which have been renovated with the help of EU funds. Smattered throughout are warehouses and large buildings for collective agriculture which are almost all in some sort of state of decay and collapse, even some of the spaces are being used for local businesses. If I'm understanding the history correctly, the lands around Mooste had been under the control of German barons throughout the 19th Century, who had built the manor house which is now occupied by the school here in Mooste. After a brief period of independence before World War II, Estonia then was absorbed into the Soviet union; and it was the Russians who had built a second manor house, which is now the home to MoKS and, at least for the next couple of weeks, me.
On the first couple of days whilst I've been here at MoKS, there were a bunch of people who had also been staying here as well. Only half of the building has been fully renovated, but the rooms are very large and can easily accommodate the seven people who had been staying down here in Mooste. Slowly, every body had left MoKS... as John & Evelyn live in the next two to the west, Tomas & Marie had to return to Tartu for classes, Camilla & Van continued on their working vacation after MoKS to Paris, Berlin, and Barcelona, and Patrick just has been wandering around Estonia, camping and crashing on people's floors before headed back to the States in a couple of weeks.

Before everyone left, we all made a trek into one of the more striking Estonian forests, which is peculiar for their trees with radically straight trunks and branches that only extend outward at the top of the forest canopy. Below, there's not much vegetation beyond small plants, but there is a never ending carpet of moss. Altogether, the forests have this feel of being in a hall of columns through which you can see in any given direction what seems like a couple hundred yards. It's quite beautiful, in fact. Mushroom & berry collecting in these forests is not just hobby here in Estonia, but it also serves as an intrinsic part of the Estonian diet. Given that Jeanne has never been partial to mushrooms, I tend to avoid them so that the two of us can share meals together; but I'm not abject to eating them. For the meals that were prepared by the Estonians here at MoKS, these ingredients played numerous roles, as garnish, flavoring agent, and central focus of the dish. But, it has to be said that the most common element of Estonian food is sour cream. If it's not a binding agent for a sauce, then it's generously poured over everything: pancakes (both sweet and savory), fish, mushrooms, potatoes, etc.

On Friday, September 7, John & Evelyn had invited me to join them in Tartu, as Evelyn had to attend an art opening of a local painter. That evening also coincided with an annual theater festival in Tartu, so we made quite a night of it, meeting up with everybody who had been staying at MoKS earlier on. After a stop a pancake house (where I got a savory pancake with ground beef and sour cream), we went to the Tartu Art Museum, which is a modest space in terms of size but polished to the all of the standards of a white box institution. The work was by Ilmar Kruusamäe, whose large scale portraits are not dissimilar to Chuck Close in terms of size and compositional strategies with the subject's dominating the canvas. Yet, I found Kruusamäe's work to hold more emotional diversity, and almost all of the portraits were of older men & women with all of their wrinkles and blemishes exposed. Later on we found our way to two of the theatrical performances. The better of the two was from a dance troupe called Võru Teatriateljee, whose pieces were somewhat abstract in terms of narrative and movement, but always grounded in human relationships. One piece was almost entirely without words (making it much easier for me to grasp) expressing the dynamics between men and women; the other dealt with the lifelong friendship between two men, and had a considerable amount of dialogue (making it more diffifcult for to grasp). Both of these pieces I found quite enjoyable. Later on in the evening, we saw the work of Katrin Essenson, which was less successful as it was little more than a martial arts display with abrasive stage lighting and canned musical accompaniment. If you wanted to find out more about these two pieces, check the festival website: draama2007.festival.ee

Back here at MoKS with no one else around me, I've been spending my days working on a couple of sound pieces, sorting through images that needed to be retouched for my portfolio, and taking long bike rides through the Estonian countryside. It's quite relaxed, and time is something that can slip by rather easily, so I've found that I do have to impose some discipline upon me, lest I just wander throughout the forest. I guess there's worse things that I could do...