“Marking the weekend before the shortest night of the year, the Estonian National Museum and the Visual Research Network together invite the public to encounter a multidisciplinary study of the nocturnal, a residency and conference in Tartu, Estonia from June 12th to June 19th, 2022. This year’s theme of Urban Night invites researchers and creative practitioners to engage with the alternative dimensions of the urban as encountered in their research, fieldwork, or artistic productions, where the notion of an urban night is explored within the broadest framing of cultural, social, behavioural and sensorial phenomena.”

During this short residency, four short films were produced by different teams, as four portraits of Tartu at night at a time of year when darkness only strokes the landscape. Anthropologist Florence Boux (EHESS, Liege), Elisabeth de Bezenac, PhD researcher in urban night design (ImaginationLancaster, Lancaster University), and film artist Piibe Kolka (Tallinn) have put together a film that uses storytelling and local myths as a way of investigating and describing a nocturnal world that exists both in its physical reality and in the collective psyche of its inhabitants. The film revisits an old Setu folk tale about a poor orphan girl who spends the night working in the sauna and is visited by Vanapagan, (literally meaning Old Bad), the god of the Underworld who comes seeking a bride to take back to his son. As she cries out in fear, a hedgehog (or some other night creature) enters the sauna and offers the girl an enigmatic phrase of advice “One by one.” With this, she finds a way to trick Vanapagan long enough to get through the night. When morning comes, the Old Bad is forced to return to the Underworld and the girl is saved.

The film re-enacts a fleeting shared memory of a tale many Estonians have heard as a child. The story is told in fragments, through multiple voices that blend into the images of midsummer nights in Tartu, a modern city that seems to spring out of a dark forest. The communal sauna, the silent streets, the river Emajõgi (“Mother”), the old wooden boat, birch forests, moths and moth-watchers, foxes, horses, teenage storytellers, archivists, vinyl records, midnight bathers, campfire sitters, gods, and hedgehogs... are all elements of Tartu after dark, both real and imaginary. The encounters between night creatures, natural elements, and human imagination, give rise to many songs, stories, and social spaces that generate warmth and comfort, allowing the inhabitants of these northern latitudes to gather around and surmount endless darkness on the freezing nights that occur on the other side of the calendar.