The Kratt Metaphor

Estonian folklore gets a modern makeover through the cooperation of the highly trained eyes of French photographers and artificial intelligence MidJourney. Our ancestors believed that the tireless worker kratt brought luck and abundance to the farm. Today, in e-Estonia, we can’t imagine life without cyber-kratts, which provide lightning-fast solutions to our problems. Both are equally clever and mystical.

In 2024, in Põlva, the morally ambiguous servant known from Estonian folklore meets the contemporary digital assistant. Both aim to make their master’s life easier, and both can work relentlessly even when the human is tired and at its wits’ end. However, if there are so many kratts constantly around us, are we able to spot them anymore and hide from them when push comes to shove?

The acclaimed photographers Eugénie Baccot’s and Cyril Abad’s exhibition “KRATT” highlights the connections between the artificial assistant and the magical creature it is named after. It is a symbiosis of the beliefs of the Estonian rural people and contemporary art, the technological developments of the 21st century, and future trends.

In 2023, the exhibition gained fame at the Rencontres d’Arles photo festival and the Fictions Documentaires festival in Carcassonne. The project has been supported by the French Ministry of Culture.

This exhibition, skillfully intertwining ancestral myths and modern reality, offers discovery and recognition to both technology and culture enthusiasts. The interpretation by the French photographers adds an exciting new layer of meaning to Estonian folklore.