flipping through heritage
short description
last edit 14.12.25
Rather than being fixed or monumental, heritage is more fluid, negotiated and embedded in everyday life. Who decides what is worth protecting or preserving? A developed glossary offers alternative linguistic and critical perspectives on value, identity and memory, while questioning how narratives are created, forgotten or rewritten, particularly in the context of the Soviet past. Drawing on three key theories - dissonant heritage, othering and heterotopia - the project presents a fresh approach to heritage.
You are warmly invited to reconsider the normative understanding of legacies. Let’s find new ways of thinking about everyday identities and our built environment, where narratives continuously evolve and interweave!
READ NEXT - the story behind a glossary about heritage
scroll down to see the entire glossary!
THE STORY BEHIND A GLOSSARY ABOUT HERITAGE
CLAIM
My process begins with questioning the value on site: Why does the heritage discourse so often focus on monuments, while Soviet-era housing estates are overlooked, even though they still carry traces of Soviet ideology and everyday life?
LET’S GO ON A JOURNEY AND FLIP THROUGH HERITAGE...
Anyone who did not receive a glossary can also view the words on this website.
How did the glossary we are all holding in our hands come about?
To give my process a better structure, I developed a glossary about heritage.
Let’s open the introduction of my glossary
Flipping – browsing – paging through a palimpsest named heritage. This tiny book is a gateway to a world of words, where Estonia’s heritage is questioned and reimagined. Rather than being a closed system, it is more of a time-document, incomplete by nature and not intended to be more. Discovering the fluidity of concepts by defining them is exciting. It’s as if I am momentarily capturing the essence of change, making it tangible for a fleeting moment – is this a paradox? These entries are not final truths, but open-ended statements, markers of a personal perspective, shaped by the terms that surfaced most insistently during my research and expanded through keywords that I proposed as being resonant for this evolving discourse.
My theoretical framework was centered on three concepts: dissonant heritage, othering and heterotopia, so they naturally became key entries as well. And then there are the words marked with the small add sign: terms that don’t come from academic texts but from personal impressions and different contexts that I believe are worth bringing into this heritage discourse. In that sense, the selection of words is just as intuitive, layered and contradictory as Shtromka itself.
I know that a glossary must seem paradoxical in this fluidity, but I maintain that heritage is fluid and define words, which seem rigid and unchangeable in comparison. However, the purpose of this glossary is to provide an insight into the world of words, establish connections, and encourage reflection. It is still an open book that can be continued and changed. The glossary can be untied, and new words can be added to the blank pages. If you find words less important than I do, cross them out! You don't have to see these suggestions and approaches to definitions in the same way I do, neither accept them.
P. 56:
Market stall
I chose this market stall - or kiosk, depending on who you ask - because it captures the in-between quality that heritage often has. At first, I thought a stall – a stand – sounds very fixed and static. But the more I looked, the more I realized the opposite, it’s flexible, it changes every day, it’s used and performed.
It sits between past and present - part Soviet kiosk culture, part neighborly activities. It survives right next to a big supermarket, it’s a place where people chat and pause. The stall bridged cultural and built heritage, it is not a monument. You can also see this place as the heart of the neighborhood and just like heritage, its meaning shifts depending on who is looking: for me it’s a market stall, for locals it’s a kiosk. This hybridity, this informality, makes it the perfect place to talk about everyday heritage.
P. 40:
Heritage Construction in Estonia
My definition:
The process of defining heritage in Estonia is shaped by the tension between what is considered “old enough” to matter and what is lived enough to be meaningful. If heritage must be at least 100 years old, then what counts as Estonian heritage? Open-air museums like Rocca al Mare or the Soviet-era landscapes that still influence everyday life? Attempts to separate “Estonian” from “Soviet” are almost impossible, because the two are intertwined:
Getting rid of the “Soviet legacy” and presenting Estonia as distant from the “East” has been one of the key issues in Estonian politics and society since the early 1990s. Much of the soviet-era architecture was seen as “not ours” or “foreign”. Heritage became a tool to rebuild identity, often through exclusion.
P. 92:
Ukraine
Soviet-era housing areas like Pelguranna, Lasnamäe or Mustamäe are often dismissed as outdated or even stigmatized, but they are full of memories and routines. Often, a large proportion of Russian-speaking people live in the neighborhoods (Jõekalda, 2024, p. 3). What could potentially cause conflict for some people in view of Estonian identity? Shtromka is both part of Estonian everyday life and marked as “other”, which makes it a heterotopic space where identities are constantly negotiated.
P. 51:
‘ka’
Theoretical framework
When I speak about heritage, I mean something fluid and ambivalent, it changes (Jõekalda, 2024). It is not only about the past, but also about how the present selects and performs the past. Heritage shape identity by drawing “cultural boundaries” (Martínez, 2018, p. 177), what is ours and what belongs to others. This process is political and social. “It is easier to erect a monument and freeze an image of the past, than to acknowledge the complexity of historical events” (Martínez, 2018, pp. 44–45). Monuments can represent the past in the present, but their removal can also rewrite narratives. “The past is not simply there: it has to be collected, articulated and maintained to become memory. The work of memory often needs a material mediation which triggers lived experiences, evokes different temporalities or carries mirroring qualities.” (Martínez, 2018, p. 133)
What is national identity?
National identities are most often constructed with narratives, rituals and traditions that establish a connection with the past and enhance a sense of belonging to a community.
A quote from Pille Petersoo:“Estonian identity is represented as an identity under a constant existential threat from the neighbouring alien civilisation. Because Soviet occupation pulled Estonia forcefully into the culturally alien Slavic world, Estonia must today purify itself from these alien influences and reclaim its western character.“ (Petersoo, 2007, p. 128)
But should identification with Estonia start with defending “the other”? I would say that the Estonian identity today is characterized by a differentiation from the Soviet past, a Western orientation, strong integration policies and also by a generational shift, maybe the soviet past even isn’t that important for people today anymore.
Key theories
It describes heritage that is uncomfortable, unwanted or difficult to integrate into national narratives (Petrulis et al., 2023). Mostly it is a term used for built heritage. It requires value-based assessment. Who interprets and why? They are places, monuments or buildings that do not have a single uncontested meaning. In Estonia especially the Baltic German and Soviet layers could be seen as dissonant heritage.
2. Othering
Helped me to look at how identity in Estonia is often been constructed by defining what is not Estonian, especially in relation to the Russian-speaking population. The Soviet era became the main “Others” for Estonia, but it also changed over the time. “Where a sovereign subject defines its colonies as ‘Others’ to consolidate its own position, is connected to heritage and the post-Soviet context through the mechanism of constructing a negative historical antithesis to establish a new national identity and legitimacy. Imperial government established an alien ideology and used “epistemic violence” to establish the “native” as a “self-consolidating other” (Spivak, 1985). In literature, the soviet past is also often portrayed as a “culturally alien” (Petersoo, 2007, p. 128). There is a continuing of traditional identity politics of defending the fragile “us” from the challenging “other” (Berg, 2002), which results in a dichotomy of Europeanisation and Russification. But this attitude has, of course, changed over the years, there is a new generation that no longer remembers the socialist era, as I mentioned before.
3. Heterotopia
Following Foucault’s term of heterotopia, allowed me to see Shtromka as a space of coexisting contradictions, a place that is both local and foreign, remembered and forgotten at the same time. Foucault describes heterotopia as “real places – places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society – which are something like counter-sites […] in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” (Mwanri & Waldenmaier, 2014, p. 100). It is also strongly connected to the concept of “othering”, because “other spaces” include two interrelated concepts: utopia and heterotopia. Utopia is an imagined place of perfection that depicts mainstream social ideals, whereas heterotopia is a realized utopia. Utopia differs from everyday life and mirrors the ideals of mainstream society. Heterotopia functions as a “real emplacement”. Heritage is made as an utopian construct that mirrors the ideals of mainstream society (Ye, 2024).
Final Event
Let's all browse through the glossary. Read the word you get and let’s talk for a minute.
Does this word mean the same to you as it does to me? Or was it even a word, you didn’t know before?
Do you see a connection to a place, a feeling, a situation somewhere here in Shtromka?
This is exactly the idea behind my glossary, using language to question heritage together, not alone. Heritage often feels big, abstract or even intimidating, so the glossary tries to bring it down to an everyday scale - something portable, approachable and personal. The heritage discourse should not only belong to politicians or professionals; it also belongs to us, to people who live in and move through places like Shtromka.
P. 70:
Palimpsest
… we are standing at a place that might not look like heritage, but it is full of routines, informal practices, social interactions and maybe a place where collective memories are stored.
And Shtromka itself is changing: the Putukaväil, the new Kodulahe housing development, a new tram is planned, not to mention the new Beach House, which attracts attention. One might think that the narrative or even the identity of Shtromka could be rewritten as a result, but it is much more a case of overwriting, adding a new layer, with the “old” shining through again and again, just like a palimpsest.
Let’s just keep our eyes open and continue tracking down our heritage!
P. 72:
“Plattenerbe”
References
Jõekalda, K. (2024). Histography of now—Russian/Soviet Monuments under Debate in Europe. Kunsttexte.de/Ostblick, 1/2024, 1–9.
Kello, K. (2018). Identity and othering in past and present: Representations of the Soviet era in Estonian post-Soviet textbooks. Journal of Social and Political Psychology, 5(2), 665–693. https://doi.org/10.5964/jspp.v5i2.737
Martínez, F. (2018). Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia.
Mwanri, L., & Waldenmaier, J. (2014). Complex Migration of global citizens. Inter-Disciplinary
Press.
Petrulis, V., Doğan, H. A., & Bliūdžius, R. (2023). Disturbing Values: Historic Thematic Framework as a Tool to Deal with the Soviet Architectural Legacy. Buildings, 13(2), 424. https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings13020424
Spivak, G. C. (1985). The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives. History and Theory, 24(3), 247. https://doi.org/10.2307/2505169
Ye, X. (2024). A heterotopic reading of heritage: The Village of Our Lady in Ka Ho, Macau. Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 65(2), 142–155. https://doi.org/10.1111/apv.12416
TO BE CONTINUED....