Telegrams from the Nose (with William Kentridge) in Tallinn


Invited by the friendly and inventive festival NYYD, Ictus and F Sarhan performed Telegrams from the Nose in Tallinn (capital of Estonia).



This show, based on Soviet Great Purges minutes, relates the trial and death of N Bukharin in 1933-1938. He was shot for obscure reasons, although he was a good friend fo Stalin himself.

Some other material of the show is taken from the short storied by Daniil Harms, such as :

I had raised dust. Children were running after me, tearing their clothing. Old men and old women fell from roofs. I whistled, I roared, my teeth chattered and I clattered like an iron bar. Lacerated children raced after me and, falling behind, broke their thin legs in their awful haste. Old men and old women were skipping around me. I rushed on! Filthy, rachitic children, looking like toadstools, got tangled under my feet. Running was hard going. I kept remembering things and once I even almost fell into the soft mush of old men and women floundering on the ground. I jumped, snapped a few heads off toadstools and trod on the belly of a thin old woman, who at this emitted a loud crunch and softly muttered: -- They've worn me out. -- Not looking back, I ran on further. Now under my feet was a clean and smooth pavement. Occasional streetlamps lit my way. I ran up to the bath-house. The welcoming bath-house flickered in front of me and the cosy but stifling bathhouse steam was already in my nostrils, ears and mouth. Without undressing, I ran straight through the changing-room, then past the taps, the tubs and the planks, to the shelf. A hot white cloud surrounds me, I hear a weak but insistent sound. I seem to be lying down.

And at this point, a mighty relaxation stopped my heart.

The venue where we performed Telegrams from the Nose was well choosen : the Vene Kultuurikeskus, which is an old building, in the soviet style !

As a russian cultural center, it has been renovated, but they were clever enough to keep the symbolic elements of the origins :



And actually that talks well about the situation of this country, taken between a timid estonian identity and a powerful and long russian and then soviet occupation.

At such a degree that some estonians consider themselves as russians-from-Estonia.

And once more, unfortunately one can see that from the communist period this country went to the hyper liberal shit that only some idiots and Americans still praise :

From tyre factories to brothels, enormous economical discrepancies, big black mercedes and poor wood housings, beggars and prostitutes, men in black, like in Russia.

Thank you capitalism, thank you, soviets.


Prostitution of the mind, prostitution of the body.

Going from political oppression to commercial oppression. Lying and killing under the name of equality, then lying and destroying under the name of freedom and money.

Choose your camp!

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