Tartu 2024 creative director on the final stretch of the events: “We decided to invest the money in people, not concrete. And that’s exactly what we did”

(The original article was published in Eesti Ekspress on 30 November.)

How do you feel now, looking back on this past year?

I feel like I should stay away from work for a while now. I knew there would be an extraordinary amount of communication, a wide range of projects, and plenty of attention from the media and public.

What I hadn’t anticipated was the political interest in what was going on in Tartu and how tiring it can be to manage a large team. And I certainly had to come down from my own ivory tower and learn to be more understanding of people whose views on culture are very different from mine.

What were your personal favourites from the programme?

It’s hard to take a step back and figure out what my personal expectations were and what the expectations of the public were. It’s hard to give an assessment, but overall I feel that everything went well, there were no major glitches or upsets. Some of the planned projects didn’t happen, but there were only a handful of them – almost everything went to plan. For the most part, my gut instinct didn’t let me down, it wasn’t like I had really high hopes for something and then was disappointed.

But in general, it will probably take me at least a couple of years to reflect on it all.

But still, pick a favourite!

From a personal perspective the Ryoji Ikeda solo exhibition certainly went very well, which I also curated, and which, fortunately for me, I think everyone likes. For me, success as a curator lies in the fact that in addition to one old work, we were able to commission two new ones, one of which – a modelling of the life cycle of Homo sapiens, i.e. mapping the process of becoming a human being – was completed in cooperation with the Estonian Biobank. But don’t worry, no one’s genes were lost in the making, as some citizens feared.

The second piece, created with the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, became extremely popular, as people fell victim to our ‘hype’. Ikeda is an electronic musician, and above all, an artist. As he himself said during the ‘Artist talk’ event, the classical “do-re-mi” doesn’t appeal to him, so naturally some classical music purists later voiced their complaints on social media, arguing that not just anyone should dabble in classical music.

The jackpot for me was definitely the visual arts projects. By far the biggest thing I was and still am a part of was the Maajaam ‘Wild bits’ exhibition. Of course, Maajaam existed before us– it was founded by Timo Toots at least ten years ago. We were aware that there was a lot of potential and that we needed to support it, so that’s what we did. And indeed, they were very accommodating. High-tech art in the open air! I think this project should definitely continue, it would add a lot to Estonian art.

I hope they will continue with the same vigour. They certainly couldn’t have done this much without the co-funding, but it’s not just about the money, it’s about the other kind of empowerment – we brought a lot of people to the place, which certainly gave it a huge leap in international visibility and capacity. I believe that ‘Wild bits’ could become a biennial-style recurring format, where some works remain permanent, forming a permanent exhibition, and new ones are added and switched out. A good parallel here would be Skulptur Projekte Münster.

What else besides visual arts?

I was very impressed with the money laundering theme in the Drama Theatre’s play ‘Business As Usual’. It’s such a global, non-local issue, and the fact that Denmark was laundering money in Estonia also adds a postcolonial layer to it. And the performance did a great job, it resonated with a broader audience, appealed to theatre critics and enthusiasts alike, and to even Peeter Koppel himself.

Do you think there has been any lasting change in Tartu this year?

Many of the projects want to be continued and are looking for ways to run independently. This means that the cultural scene is becoming more diverse and, I hope, more exciting. We had decided that the money should not be invested in concrete, or infrastructure and objects, but in people, and that everything should be eventful, and it was.

Tartu and Southern Estonia have been empowered and can develop from this. Many of the project leaders gained experience in applying for international funding. Twenty municipalities cooperated with each other, which is not something to be taken for granted. Thanks to a lot of effort, everything went smoothly and no municipality left a project. But the next few years will show whether anything in the region changes in a more permanent way.

Did the backdrop of the painful cutbacks affect you and the team?

Well, generally speaking, some Capitals of Culture succeed and some fail. Those that fail are those where national or municipal support is lost. This means that the grant is not paid on time, which means everything comes with a delay and at the end of the year, three years’ work has to be done, which means a lot is left undone. I have to give a lot of credit to both the City of Tartu and the Ministry of Culture, because there was never once a feeling that something was going to fall through. In addition, fortunately, our programme was not interfered with and our content was not censored in one way or another.

Is nightlife back in Tartu now? Last autumn, there was a plan to bring it back to life.

I don’t know. There were indeed two amazing events: a festival organised by the Unda nightclub Hall team and an event hosted by the Kauge Tartu nightlife venues. Both went well. Kauge was more direct and raw, while Unda focused more on giving meaning to nightlife. The events complemented each other and aimed to solve issues with nightlife in Tartu. We’ll see what happens next; all the prerequisites are in place for Tartu to become alive at night as well.

Which brings us to the most important thing that has also been a source of constant debate for Facebook’s keyboard warriors this year. Bryan Adams at the Song Festival Grounds!

Well, when we were building the whole system, we had to figure out how to manage the use of our logo. Because everyone wanted to put it everywhere – on cupcakes, on their personal concert programme flyers and everything else they could think of. We decided not to make the logo freely available because we didn’t want it to be used by some torchlight procession.

Instead, we made it so that the logo could be used only if you wanted to be part of our event calendar. As long as there is no conflict of values and the event isn’t outright ridiculous. Bryan Adams was not in our main programme; the organiser of the concert filled in a form and attained the right to use the logo. It was not part of a curated selection and we did not give any financial support for this concert.

There was certainly no good reason to say no to Live Nation, who organised the concert and wanted to be part of our event calendar. To not have put it in the event calendar would’ve been a very narrow view of culture. But as expected, someone picked up the topic and Adams suddenly became our main event. I didn’t foresee something like this turning into such a big controversy. However, in hindsight, I wouldn’t have done anything differently. It’s a bit of a pity that a lot of effort was spent talking about this one event, instead of talking about everything else that also went on.