City Is the Thing Bodies, Languages and Time Move Through: Concrete Structures of In-Betweenness

In my postdoctoral research project 'City Is the Thing Bodies and Time Move Through: Concrete Structures of In-Betweenness' I study the city of Narva, an Estonian post-industrial border town, partly together with a multilingual working group. I approach the city as a concrete yet fantasmatic structure that bodies, languages, ideologies, and temporalities move through. Drawing on hauntology as a methodological orientation and using it metaphorically, site-specific, collective artistic processes and events that engage memories, spatial layers, suppressed narratives, and non-verbal experience are used as a method. Languages are part of haunting: they are shapeshifting and embedded in power structures. The context reveals how languages move between dominance and marginality, and how English today functions as a global mediator and gatekeeper in artistic research. The experience of growing up in bilingual families, working in multilingual environments, forgetting one’s mother tongue and facing the conflicted language situation in Narva—where Russian remains the lived language while political pressure to Estonianize the region intensifies—reveals the shifting ontologies of language, identity, and the architectural structures that both shape and are shaped by them. “Minority” and “majority” are not fixed categories but relational positions that change as power relations and geopolitical contexts shift. Concept of in-betweenness remains central: how thinking and practicing take place in spaces that resist conceptual closure. Narva is geographically, temporally, and politically in-between: post-Soviet yet European, industrial yet post-industrial, nostalgic yet future-oriented. By creating collective research situations I propose in-betweenness as an epistemic and methodological condition for artistic research: a way of working with uncertainty, translation, and relationality in contexts where linguistic, spatial, and political structures intersect.