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Ethno-Futurism: Leaning on the Past, Working for the Future

2017; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 43; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/692561

2156-4914

Anders Kreuger,

Art Education and Development

Previous articleNext article FreeEthno-Futurism: Leaning on the Past, Working for the FutureAnders KreugerAnders KreugerPDFPDF PLUSAbstractFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreAbstractAnders Kreuger travels to the Finno-Ugrian republics of Russia to explore the past, present and future of the ethno-futurist art movement.Kuchyran Yuri, Kuara-Langa (Echo), 2004, meditative performance. Photograph: Konstantin Semyonov. Courtesy the artistIn life nothing disappears without a trace. This is also true of Udmurt shamanism, the peculiar world of tuno. Many of its elements were transferred to folk songs, dances, rhymes, cumulative recitative songs or tongue twisters, and also to healing rituals (known as tuno-pelyó and pelyasskis). Still in the late 1960s I could, as an eight-year-old boy, observe a man dancing, with strange body movements, at a celebration for a newborn child (nuny syuan). As he danced he stripped off his clothes, crawled on the floor, cried, imitated lovemaking (thus echoing shamanic initiations?) to the mirthful laughter of the others present.– Kuchyran Yuri, 'Udmurt Shamanism: My Antiquity and My Modernity', 20011I know the topic of this essay will appear obscure to some, if not most, of our readers. Nevertheless, I think it should be relevant to a wider auditorium than those who usually follow the cultural politics of the so-called Finno-Ugrian world. Ethno-futurism started as a political joke by an eighteen-year-old poet in the Estonian university town of Tartu, at the twilight of Soviet power. No one expected it to grow into a movement with its own international conferences, festivals and creative workshops, informally headquartered in the Udmurt Republic and still alive after more than 25 years. Moreover, I think we should include the distant cousins of the Estonians and the Finns inside Russia in our discussion about what 'indigeneity' means today. It complicates the concept, since these peoples cannot be categorised either as indigenous 'tribes' or as fully autonomous 'nations'. (Not wishing to digress into a survey of the tricky terminology used to describe how peoples see themselves or how others see them, I leave the inverted commas hanging.)In 2005, the curators at the then-new Kumu art museum in Tallinn, the Estonian capital, asked me for project proposals, and high on my list was an exhibition about their faraway kin. The response was one of perplexed dismay. 'Don't you think we had enough of all that ugri-mugri [an ironic term not found in any dictionary] in the 1970s? We were forced to go on ethnographic expeditions to those godforsaken places as students back then. And besides, the whole discourse of ethnic solidarity is now considered very nationalist and right wing. No, it's a terrible idea!' I must have misunderstood the Estonians' sense of humour, because I thought the topic was dead, but a couple of years later they got in touch again. 'We have some European funding. When can you go and do your research?' So, in the summer of 2007, I found myself travelling in the Finno-Ugrian republics of Russia, together with a small group of invited artists from Estonia, Lithuania, Finland and Hungary, and in the winter of 2008 an exhibition titled 'The Continental Unconscious: Contemporary Art and the Finno-Ugrian World' opened at Kumu.2Along the way, I made friends amongst the ethno-futurists around the Great Volga Bend, where the Mordvins, the Udmurt and the Mari coexist quite amicably with the Turkic-speaking descendants of the medieval Kazan Khanate (and, of course, with the Russian-speaking majority population), and in the more northern Republic of Komi, which, in the 1920s, dreamt of establishing direct shipping links with Petsamo, the seaport on the Kola Peninsula that belonged to Finland before the war. I included a number of these artists in the exhibition, along with heraldry, book illustrations, tapes from the television archives in the various republics' capitals (Saransk, Izhevsk, Yoshkar-Ola and Syktyvkar) and many other things. Just recently, in the winter of 2017, I returned to the region, to see how my previous collaborators and their ethno-futurist movement had been faring while my attention was focussed elsewhere.Izmail Efimov, Yo (Shamanic Rite), 1994, watercolour on paper, 70 × 50 cm. Courtesy M HKA, Antwerp and the artistWhere Do They Come From? What Are They? Where Are They Going?Living on the banks of the big Siberian rivers flowing from south to north, these people associated the south, the upper streams of the rivers, with the Upper World, the world of celestial gods, and the north, the lower streams of the rivers, with the Lower World, the world of death and evil spirits.– Vladimir Napolskikh, 'Earth-Diver Myth (A812) in Northern Eurasia and North America: Twenty Years Later', 20123Before I address the current situation I feel should situate my protagonists in cultural spacetime. I am aware that this perceived necessity is a reverberation of the colonising violence that pushes the subjugated subject out of the field of metropolitan vision and turns her into an object of 'discovery'. That is why I paraphrase Paul Gauguin's title for his large painting of the three stages of life, a panoramic tableau set in French Polynesia, the still-colonial Oceanian archipelago that is, in so many ways, an instructive mirror-image of the Eurasian inland empire to which the Finno-Ugrians are confined.4It is common knowledge that most languages in Europe are related to each other and to languages in India and Iran, and also that Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian are not Indo-European, but few non-linguists would know the other members of the larger language family they belong to. It is named after the not very prominent Ural Mountains in northern Russia, where geographers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries decided that continental Europe becomes Asia. Philological convention tells us that this Uralic family tree has two trunks connected at the base, Samoyedic and Finno-Ugric, and one loosely attached thicker branch, Sami.The Samoyeds (this is a Russian derogatory name meaning 'self-eaters', i.e. cannibals) are divided into four nomadic or semi-nomadic tribes, currently numbering 30,000 altogether and living along the Arctic coast on both sides of the Urals. Of the Ugric languages, three survive. Khanty and Mansi are spoken by just 15,000 people in oil-rich western Siberia. Hungarian, on the other hand, is spoken by almost fifteen million people. Despite some elaborate theories, no one has quite been able to explain how and why this Ugric nation ended up on the Danube and in Transylvania without losing its language. The 85,000 Sami are divided into a number of smaller groups, and they are scattered over the northern parts of Norway, Sweden and Finland, and on Russia's Kola Peninsula. Some researchers think they may have adopted their present languages – which are interrelated but distinct – from their southeastern neighbours.The Finnic language group is divided into four subgroups. The three that concern us here – Permic (Udmurt, Komi-Zyryan, Komi-Permyak), Mari (Hill Mari, Meadow Mari) and Mordvin (Erzya, Moksha) – are spoken by around three million people altogether. Baltic Finnic (consisting of Finnish, Karelian, Vepsian, Votian, Estonian, Livonian and a few smaller, intermediate dialects) is the fourth and largest subgroup. Finnish is spoken by some five million and around a million speak Estonian; the other languages have far fewer speakers, and are dwindling. Several Finnic-speaking populations in today's central Russia, notably the Merya and the Muroma, have either gone extinct or become assimilated since the late Middle Ages. Despite this loss of linguistic and cultural identity, or perhaps because of it, they keep resurfacing as 'phantom limbs' in contemporary Russian culture.The recently forged consensus between linguists and archaeologists is that the speakers of Proto-Uralic must have inhabited the region between the Great Volga Bend and the Ural Mountains sometime around 2000 BCE. When new data from population genetics and paleogenetics are factored in, together with additional linguistic theorising (such as the reconstructed link between Uralic and all-but-extinct Yukaghir in eastern Siberia) and the necessarily speculative results of comparative mythology (such as studies of the widely distributed so-called Earth-Diver Myth5) it becomes possible to assume that Proto-Uralic was part of a much larger constellation of languages and cultures originating several millennia earlier, in north-eastern China, and including the ancestors of today's Manchu-Tungus peoples (the elite of the Qing dynasty, who lost power in 1911).Udmurt participants in the First Ethno- Futurist Conference visiting Udmurt students in Tartu, 1994. Photograph: Olga Listratova. Kuchyran Yuri is fourth from left in the back row. Courtesy Kuchyran YuriPre-revolutionary Russia offered no codified rights for the inorodtsy (literally 'those of alien birth' – ethnic minorities without access to the higher echelons of society), but because of general underdevelopment they mostly remained settled in rural areas and could therefore preserve their own languages and customs. After the revolution, the Bolshevik takeover and the disastrous civil war, the national minorities became a major preoccupation of the new rulers. A certain Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, better known as Stalin, was People's Commissar of Nationalities from 1917 until 1923, and thus instrumental for the territorial reordering of the empire into what eventually became a multitier system of Soviet Socialist Republics, Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republics and various autonomous provinces and districts. In the 1920s and early 30s the keyword was korenizatsiya (derived from the Russian word for 'root' but translatable as 'indigenisation'): the promotion of proletarian culture in the many national languages of the USSR and the creation of new indigenous elites.This ended abruptly and lethally with Stalin's great purges, culminating in 1937, which specifically targeted the new elites. Many peoples of the USSR also shared the fate that befell the Chechens and the Crimean Tatars in 1944, when their entire populations were deported to Central Asia. The last four decades of Soviet rule brought some degree of economic development – but also steady and thorough Russification – to most parts of the vast country, including the Finno-Ugrian ASSRs. In the Mordvin and Komi republics, this process was amplified by the many prison camps. (Two members of Pussy Riot famously did time in Mordovia a few years ago.) Udmurtia was a closed zone, because of the secret military plants located there. (They are still thriving, not least the factory in Izhevsk that makes Kalashnikov rifles.) The Mari Autonomous Republic has always been economically backward and poorly governed, but has also remained culturally more indigenous than the others. (There is, for instance, a lively Mari-language pop music scene.)Yuriy Lisovskiy, Utka nesushchaya zhizn' (Duck Carrying Life), 2013, marker and ink on paper, 62 × 86 cm. Courtesy the artistTo be fair, the USSR did not treat its national minorities as natives on reserves. Literature and scholarship in Finno-Ugrian languages was tolerated and even promoted. Socialist Realism, in all the arts, was supposed to be 'socialist in content, national in form'. In the 1960s and 70s, operas were composed around librettos in Meadow Mari and Udmurt, while the Komi got a 'national ballet'; all these were staged in purpose-built theatres that are still open to the public. Jimmie Durham, after travelling to Yakutia (a vast republic for the mainly Turkic-speaking population of north-eastern Siberia) in the mid-1990s, wrote: 'They have their own Academy of Sciences, but most tolerate also an outpost of the Russian Academy of Sciences. […] They, as Siberians – so many groups, tribes, cultures, histories – would like to see the continuation of the union of Soviet states. But without Russian dominance. For them the Russians are like the Americans to us: loud, arrogant, infantile and completely destructive.'6Other national minorities, such as the Tatars or various Caucasian peoples, are more visible in Russian public life and have secured more de facto autonomy over their republics than the Finno-Ugrians, who have often opted for an elusive modus vivendi in their relations with the Empire. But not always. The Cheremis wars of the sixteenth century (this was the pre-revolutionary name for the Mari) were just as unforgivingly brutal as the Caucasian wars three hundred years later. Like Grozny in Chechnya, Yoshkar-Ola ('Red City') was built as a fort for putting down indigenous rebellion. Though officially Orthodox, the Mari and the Udmurts (and to a somewhat lesser extent the Mordvins) also preserved many elements of their pre-Christian beliefs and rituals – therefore they are sometimes called 'Europe's last pagans'. But we should note that the open-air communal meals and praying events that take place today reflect a post-Soviet syncretism: a mix of genuine tradition, Russian Orthodox influences, the political neopaganism of the 1990s and New Age.Izmail Efimov, Ertyshy kechy (TheDay That Passed), 1984, tempera on canvas, 125 × 178 cm. Courtesy Museum of Visual Art of the Republic of Mari El, Yoshkar-OlaEthno-Futurism as a Cultural PhenomenonThe number of internet users has grown to c. 45 million and is still only at its starting point. […]The net helps Ugrians to preserve the dispersed way of life peculiar to them, without losing contact with the rest of the world. It helps to make use of unseen possibilities for self-expression and association. No nation has a lead of centuries in using the net; it is new in America as well as in Scandinavia and Siberia.The Ugrians' plan to conquer the world relies on the creative harmony of the ancient turn of mind and contemporary technology.This is the great hidden opportunity for the Finno-Ugrians.Ethno-futurism, putting in motion creative powers, is not an ideology but a way to survive as well as a modus vivendi.– First Ethno-Futurist Manifesto, 19947The late 1980s and early 90s saw a great wave of activity in the decaying Soviet empire. Many greeted its collapse with optimism, despite the uncertainty and economic distress it brought. It is, I believe, wise to take the dystopian vision of a degrading transition now propagated in Russia (and endorsed by what feels like a majority of the population) with a grain of salt. This was also a very political period, a period of creative and sometimes unrealistic ideas, a period when freedom of expression was real and young people made a difference.Eesti Kostabi-$elts, the Estonian Kostabi $ociety, was named after the Estonian- American painter Kalev Mark Kostabi, who used to take out full-page ads in Flash Art because he had the dollars to pay for them. It was founded in Tartu in 1989 by the five young writers of the Hirohall group: the poets Sven Kivisildnik, Valeria Ränik, Karl Martin Sinijärv (who had come up with the term 'ethno-futurism') and Kauksi Ülle, joined by the novelist Jüri Ehlvest. Like all radical young people in this part of the world at this time, they flirted with neoliberal ideas (a commercial art market seemed like a utopian joke to them), but their lasting contribution to post-Soviet cultural history was the gathering organised to mark the fifth anniversary of their $ociety. True to the tradition of ugri-mugri, they invited around a hundred representatives of Finno-Ugrian peoples – including the Udmurts, Komi, Mari, Erzya Mordvins, Karelians, Livonians, Sami and Hungarians, as well as the Setu minority of southern Estonia – to the First Ethno-Futurist Conference in Tartu in 1994.In the 1990s, some prominent Estonian intellectuals, such as the poet Jaan Kaplinski or the political scientist and politician Rein Taagepera, began to promote ethno-futurism as a suitable ideology for smaller peoples seeking to productively reconcile cultural identity and societal progress. Taagepera, who also wrote on the politics of the Finno-Ugrian minorities in Russia,8 elaborated the 'ethno-futurist triangle' by adding two neologisms of his own invention: 'cosmofuturism' (progress erases ethnic traditions, and this is a good thing) and 'ethno-praeterism' (the ethnic past is 'pure', and its replacement through new and alien phenomena is a bad thing).9 There was a will to theorise ethno-futurism by paying homage to the 'ethno-philosophers' who supposedly prefigured it, such as the Estonian theologian and detractor of 'Standard Average European Thinking', Uku Masing (1909–85), or the Komi-born anti-Kantian inventor of 'Limitism', Kallistrat Zhakov (1866–1926), who finished his days in independent Latvia.10Ethno-futurism was conceived as a future-oriented mode of thinking, so much so that its initial tech-optimism now appears quaint, almost misguided. It should be noted that the term was never meant to reference the futurisms of the early twentieth century, despite attempts back then at applying the programmes of Marinetti or Mayakovsky in the new, smaller eastern European nation states and, to a more limited extent, in the Finno-Ugrian outposts of the USSR. For the exhibition in Tallinn in 2008, for instance, we brought all the contents – and some employees – of a rural museum dedicated to the Udmurt futurist poet and cross-dressing actor Kuzebai Gerd, who stood accused of plotting to dig a 2000-kilometre-long tunnel to Finland and perished in the Gulag in 1932.The fate of ethno-futurism as a movement in art was, in fact, to be determined by those guests at the conference in Tartu, many of them on their first trip to the 'West'. In a group photograph from that occasion, the young printmaker and graphic designer Yuriy Lobanov from Izhevsk stands out. Still in his early thirties, he had just authored the black-white-red flag and man-bird coat of arms of the Udmurt Republic. (He was not the only artist to make such a contribution to his republic. The Mordovian flag was conceived by the artist Andrey Aleshkin (born in 1959), another early ethno-futurist; Izmail Efimov, yet another member of the movement, was until recently responsible for the heraldry of the republic of Mari El.) As part of his project to revive traditional names, Lobanov had chosen for himself the vorshud (protector of the kin) Kuchyran, a reference to the 'Owl Clan'. Adding the Udmurt form of his Russian first name after the clan name, according to the old Finno-Ugrian custom that is still official usage in Hungary, he became Kuchyran Yuri. He also presented friends and associates with such reconstructed names.11Kuchyran Yuri is a free spirit and a spiritual traveller, as anyone who has witnessed his free-form shamanic live performances can testify, but also a skilled and dedicated organiser with a sure instinct for staying out of politics while securing official support for his projects. He has an almost uncanny talent for incorporating new ideas into his own thinking and activities. While the Estonian inventors of ethno-futurism always treated it with some irony, he and his Udmurt contemporaries, notably the theatre director Olga Alexandrova and the writers Pyotr Zakharov and Viktor Shibanov, took it seriously. They saw it as plausible cultural policy for the Finno-Ugrian peoples and other ethnic minorities in Russia, and with the Second International Ethno-Futurist Conference in Izhevsk in 1998, they launched a new and longer-lasting wave of ethno-futurism, based on cultural practice rather than political speculation.Artists, fashion designers, theatre directors and musicians around the Great Volga Bend saw ethno-futurism as a more permissive and experimental alternative to the watered-down versions of Socialist Realism ('capitalist in content, socialist in form') that still today dominate the Russian art scene. Colleagues amongst the Turkic-speaking Chuvash, Tatars and Bashkirs joined their Finno-Ugrian neighbours. Perm, a Russian-speaking city of more than a million inhabitants, has hosted the ethno-futurist festival KAMWA since 2006.Art historians have also contributed to the movement, notably Elena Butrova from Saransk, specialising in the remarkable Mordvin-born sculptor Stepan Nefedov-Erzia (1876–1959; the work he made in Argentina in the 1920s and 30s deserves an essay of its own in these pages), and Elvira Kolcheva from Yoshkar-Ola. A certain level of academic self-reflection was thus built into 'second-generation' ethno-futurism from the beginning – another reason why we should engage with it critically and not merely affirm it as a manifestation of indigeneity. In her doctoral dissertation, titled 'Ethno-Futurism as a Cultural Phenomenon', Kolcheva summarises the achievements of the Izhevsk crew: The main ethno-futurist Finno-Ugrian events were the yearly festivals in Izhevsk in the Udmurt Republic, organised by the informal group Odomaa ('Native Land' in Udmurt). The impulse to form this new creative association was the international ethno-futurist conference held in Izhevsk in 1998. Its members worked in different genres in the different arts. In the core group of Odomaa were Sergey Orlov, Vyacheslav Mikhailov, Zoya Lebedeva and Yuriy Lobanov (Kuchyran Yuri). With support from the Ministry of National Policies of the Udmurt Republic, they started realising their mega-project 'Ethno-Futurist Festival', which brought eleven international ethno-futurist festivals into the world: 1. Egit gondyr veme [A House for a Young Bear], June 1998;2. Odomaa [Native Land], July 1998;3. Erumaa [Land of Love], October 1998;4. Kalmez [Fish–Man], March–April 1999;5. Mushomu [Land of Bees], May–July 2000;6. Tangyra [Udmurt Tamtam], April 2001;7. Inda [a legendary hero], May 2002;8. Pel'nyan ['Ear-Bread', a Eurasian ravioli], June 2003;9. Yur-yar [Noisy Gathering], July 2004;10. Artana [Wood Stack], August 2005;11. Kuara-langa [Echo], March 2006. The continuation of this mega-project was another grandiose mega-project, 'Ethno- Futurist Symposium', which started with the creative symposium Ser no tur ('Light of Art') in Izhevsk in 2007.12The symposia have continued, in various locations across the Udmurt Republic and elsewhere, almost every year, in both summer and winter, with participants from the region and from further abroad. The consistent use of Udmurt titles reflects the pragmatic linguistic activism of the organisers. Since 2010, these activities have been managed by the Emnoyumno (Divine Elixir) group, a successor of Odomaa, founded by Kuchyran Yuri and his younger colleague Zhon-Zhon Sandyr (Alexander Pushin). It is part of the larger association Izhkar (the Udmurt name for Izhevsk), which comprised of the groups Thanatos (Sergey Orlov and Envil Kasimov) and Belmikhaibat (an acronym combining the surnames of the members Valentin Belykh, Vyacheslav Mikhailov and Viktor Batyrshin).Pavel Mikushev, Nerest (Spawning), 2016, acrylic on cardboard, 70 × 90 cm. Courtesy the artistThe artists behind Emnoyumno chose the ethno-futurist motto 'leaning on the past, working for the future', a quote from the Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo, and used it in two manifestos: one internal, one for external use. It may seem paradoxical that ethno-futurism, which seeks to reinterpret rural traditions for alternative futures, should have its informal headquarters in an industrial, Russian-speaking city of more than 600,000 inhabitants, but as Viktor Shibanov points out, it is 'a bird with two wings': '"Ethno-" is the link to the national and the indigenous; "futurism" is the attempt to find a place and be competitive in the postmodern contemporary world.'13Those I spoke to during my recent trip expressed some concern for the future of ethno-futurism. It appears to be having trouble renewing itself and recruiting new practitioners. Most artists who identify with the movement are now in their fifties. It may be difficult to sustain it as the cultural climate in Russia changes. Yet on 13 January 2017, I attended a screening of the works produced during Zhon-zhon Uddyadi, the Fifth International Ethno-Futurist Symposium for Performance and Video Art that had taken place in the village of Uddyadi (officially named Karamas-Pelgin) the week before. These short and unassuming performance-based videos are deliberately and liberatingly simple. I found them both formally subtle and dryly entertaining. Some of the authors, such as the Udmurt artist Chimali (Ksenia Voronchikhina), are in their mid-twenties.Visual artists and other cultural practitioners who live and work outside of Moscow and St Petersburg do not address their fellow citizens from a position of strength unless they choose to become politically active in the ruling party. There are examples of that in Izhevsk, notably the painter Envil Kasimov (who is now in charge of public security in the Udmurt Republic) but also the accomplished folk-jazz singer Nadezhda Utkina. Even those who do their best not to be too outspoken may come under political fire. In 2016, a certain Igumen Vitaliy, signing as 'Cleric of the Ivanovo-Voznesensky Diocese', published an ominously titled article on the right-wing nationalist site Russkaya Narodnaya Liniya (The Russian National Line). 'Ethno-Futurism and Separatism' argues that the ethno-futurists' quest for a new Finno-Ugrian identity, especially when associated with neopaganism and when situating itself 'outside every connection with the history of the Russian people and of Russian statehood', is to be equated with other tendencies aimed at 'breaking up the Russian Federation', such as the promotion of a specifically Siberian identity.Post-Vogue, Mimikriya, Misteriya Chudi (Mimicry, Mystery of the Chud'), 2003, performance at the Pel'nyan ethnofuturist festival. Photograph: Natalya Shostina. Courtesy Kuchyran YuriThe writer takes special offence at what we might call 'third-generation' ethno-futurism, namely the attempts to reconstruct a 'Meryan' Finno-Ugrian identity for the central regions of European Russia, championed by a small group of media artists and local-history activists contributing to the website merjamaa.ru. The group centres on the artist and graphic designer Andrey Malyshev-Meryanin, who used to live in Moscow but has now moved to Minsk. Meryan ethno-futurism appears to be a mainly urban phenomenon, driven by nostalgia for the rural childhood of parents and grandparents. It has found a mainstream outlet in the feel-good films of Alexei Fedorchenko, a director based in Ekaterinburg.14 Overreacting to an exhibition by Malyshev-Meryanin in the city of Ivanovo in 2014, Igumen Vitaliy wrote: 'It is fully possible that we will see a time when, in Central Russia, from Moscow to Nizhniy Novgorod, everyone can be forced to speak a "Meryan" language. [He used the word mova, which means 'language' in Ukrainian.] And this will be taught at school as the national language. We find contemporary examples of such things rather close to us, in the historical as well as the geographical sense.'15Critical Ethno-Futurism and Protuberances of Cosmic Love1. Ethno-futurism is not a style, but a direction of movement and an ideology.2. Artistic creation is a departure from mediocrity and a 'serious game' with symbols, archetypes and mythological elements of national culture. It therefore gives them new meaning in the light of the contemporary. It is the sacred art of light, with positive and pure energy.3. The possibility for national cultures and universal human values to coexist and enrich each other.4. Enliven the world with the help of the deep unconscious, to make society more human, subtle and receptive.5. Spiritual mutual assistance, as an instrument for brighter manifestations of individuality.– Kuchyran Yuri, Sergey Orlov and Zhon-Zhon Sandyr, 'Ethno-Futurism: Theses for a Manifesto, 201116This 'institutional' recapitulation of ethno-futurism should not be regarded as exhaustive or even comprehensive. When introducing regional art histories to international audiences we are rarely at liberty to present a fully argued account. We tend to synthesise the facts and offer only the enticing details. As we move on to discuss the works of individual artists, we should reinsert some of the nuance that had to be forsaken in the overall narrative. We should not renounce our critical faculties just because we want to give people credit for being part of a movement. We should also acknowledge that any act of situating beginnings and origins in space and time, and identifying them with concrete deeds by concrete people, is inevitably subjective. It is to do with how things are remembered and by whom, but also, on a deeper level, with becomings and transformations, which can almost never be retraced and retold in linear fashion.The shift in outlook and ambition amongst some artists and writers in the Finno-Ugrian republics had already happened before they joined their European kin at the First Ethno-Futurist Conference in Tartu. Otherwise they would not have gone there. During the last years of the USSR, there was renewed interest in national languages and cultures all over the country, also amongst the Finno-Ugrians. People had become less fearful. There was a new openness to experimental, 'non-conformist' culture. When the first meeting of Finno-Ugrian writers in Russia took place in Yoshkar-Ola in 1989, the Youth Association of the Finno-Ugrian Peoples (commonly abbreviated to MAFUN) was founded as a result; when it convened again in 1990, an exhibition of young Finno-Ugrian artists was organised, offering a new generation of painters an opportunity to show works that deviated, if only a little, from the norms and methods of Socialist Realism. I