Ethnofuturism?

[The Ripper]

I've heard the term used in passing before, and just now as I was doing some googling on Livonians, I came upon this Ethno-futurist site, etnofutu.

It seems this ethnofuturism is a mainly Baltic Finnish (originally Estonian) thing (even though they profess a wider Finno-Ugric orientation), so I thought it would be quite fitting that I open a thread for it here.

The concept is interesting and it reminds me a concept called Archeo-futurism, although I'm guessing this Finnic ethnofuturism originates from a milieu rather different from the Western European far-right margin. It seems, that the literary movement was most active in the late 90's and early 00's.

Here is one definition of the concept as presented by one of the originators:

“…ethnofuturism is a joining of the archaic, prehistorical, ethnic substance peculiar to our nation with the modern, sometimes even futuristic form. Or the other way round – the archaic form (e.g. runo-song) with a contemporary vision of the world. Ethnofuturism can also be related to surrealism, but it is more nationalistic in its manifestos, strongly stressing national diversities. No doubt one of the reasons for the rise of ethnofuturism was an elevated interest in the history of the nation, its folklore (especially folk songs and ancient beliefs) and everything else that stresses the diversity of the nation”

I found this quote in an article in the Estonian Literary Magazine. The article is a useful place to start when trying to understand what ethnofuturism is and where it came from. I've highlighted some bits I find particularly interesting.

Ethnofuturism: the Bridge Between National and International in
Estonian Poetry

Anneli Mihkelev

1. The history and social background

Ethnofuturism is a term which was born like a joke because there was a need for innovations in literature and art in liberated Estonia, but now it is a serious thing. The social background of ethnofuturism was connected with the national liberation movement in Estonia in the late 1980s. As Piret Viires writes, the term ethnofuturism was born spontaneously among a small group of young writers and artists in Tartu in the late 1980s at the time of liberation in Estonia. The birth of the term was connected with two literary organisations: the “Hirohall”, which was a little group (only five members: Karl Martin Sinijärv, who was the direct inventor of the term, Sven Kivisildnik, Kauksi Ülle, Valeria Ränik and Jüri Ehlvest) of young writers active from 1988 to 1991 in Tartu, and the second group was the Estonian Kostabi-$ociety. The spirit of the revolutionary period affected all the group members at that time. Spiritual inspiration was provided by Estonian-American artist Kalev Mark Kostabi, who represented the completed unity of money and art: he tried to destroy the myth of the poor artist, affirming that the artist, as well as the poet, can also be rich.1

The Estonian Kostabi-$ociety and the group “Hirohall” defined the term ethnofuturism broadly: “…ethnofuturism is a joining of the archaic, prehistorical, ethnic substance peculiar to our nation with the modern, sometimes even futuristic form. Or the other way round – the archaic form (e.g. runo-song) with a contemporary vision of the world. Ethnofuturism can also be related to surrealism, but it is more nationalistic in its manifestos, strongly stressing national diversities. No doubt one of the reasons for the rise of ethnofuturism was an elevated interest in the history of the nation, its folklore (especially folk songs and ancient beliefs) and everything else that stresses the diversity of the nation”.2

‘At the same time ethnofuturism has become a term used to mark a special worldview and creative method even outside Estonia. The term has spread among young Finno-Ugric writers and artists.4 Both Kauksi Ülle, a poet from South Estonia and the mother of the ethnofuturism movement, and Kari Sallama from the University of Oulu, connect the term’s two roots: ethnos and future. The first root strives for the national and the second strives for the future. National here means ancient Finno-Ugric culture, which exists in our national memory; it is our essence, not borrowed from the German culture. The future here means that we want to take all ancient culture into the future and it is not defined in the same way as the Italian or Russian literary movement of the 1910s.5

I think the general model characterises not only Finno-Ugrian and other little nations, but also great nations. The balance between all three terms is very important and usually the great nations have achieved a balance: they don’t have many critical situations. If the balance is lost in a situation, one aspiration is activated. For example, in the Soviet period, little nations were endangered and the scales were tipped toward cosmofuturism and then ethnofuturism arose as a counterbalance. I think if an analogous situation happened, for example, in French, German or English culture, the reaction would be the same. The three aspirations exist not only in society but in literature too of course: literature represents the varying situations of society.

2. Ethnofuturism and literature

Therefore ethnofuturism is the modus vivendi for a nation in crisis and it may also be a method of literature or art. At the same time it requires a postmodern society, because ethnofuturism is an intellectual movement or struggle. Postmodernism arose in the 1960s or 1970s or even in the late 1950s. In my opinion Estonian ethnofuturism was born in 1958, in exile, with Kalju Lepik’s sixth collection, Kivimurd (The Quarry). Nobody knew that it was ethnofuturism, but Lepik began to use a new poetic mode and the political situation was as critical as it was at the end of the 1980s. Therefore ethnofuturism as a phenomenon is older than the term itself. The beginning of the postmodern age in European culture favoured, in turn, ethnofuturism in Estonian literature in exile, particularly in poetry: Estonian poetry played a great role in forming and preserving the Estonian national identity during the Soviet period and after.

With an imitative-structural allusion to Estonian alliterative verse, Kalju Lepik reveals what has been hidden in the collective unconscious of his people.

For example Kalju Lepik’s poem “Kivimurd” (“The Quarry”) is a poem with contemporary content in alliterative verse form, imitative of ancient verse; it is not original. Alliterative verse is the sign of ethnofuturism in that poem. At the same time, in the last three verses, irony, directed to the present age, culminates: “Uus aeg ussitas,/ vihavingu sussitas.// Tuli ja pussitas”.9 The last verses are in the style of later folk songs. The entire poem is a mixture of old and modern, or a mixture of different languages: the poet uses old words alongside modern ones. At the same time, an essential element of Lepik’s poetry is that it serves nationalism.

The same tendencies arose at the end of the 1980s when the term ethnofuturism was invented in the Estonian homeland. At the end of the 1980s the innovative period in our literature began. And as was true with the exile movement, the innovative period of Estonian literature began with innovations in poetry. First there was a period of punk poetry in 1986-1989, which brought to Estonian poetry the style of the spoken language, the low style and social protest connected with patriotism. And the “Hirohall” and Estonian Kostabi-$ociety in Tartu played a major role in 1989-1992.10

In summary, we may say that innovation was discernible in three spheres of Estonian poetry in the 1990s: the language of poetry, the subject of poetry and its intertextuality. All of these spheres are connected to language, the primary subject of linguistic experiments. A uniform literary language dominated Estonian poetry during the Soviet period, but at the end of the 1980s and into the 1990s, various forms of slang, the dialect of South Estonia, fragments of foreign languages, forms of archaic Estonian language etc. surfaced. The commingling of various fragments of different languages is an essential aspect. In addition, increases in quotation and intertextuality have appeared in texts11 (Kalju Lepik’s poetry is rich in allusions and quotations too). Language, especially the language of poetry, was the main emphasis of the linguistic experiments: neologisms and new forms of poetry as well as the use of dialects and the form of runo-songs. The old forms and symbols are combined with the present time and at the same time the roles of authors or the subjects of poetry were important. This means that poets performed their own poems and appeared in certain roles: a peasant, a folk singer, a postman etc. And it was important that poets were active in the mass media too. On TV and radio, poetry took on the features of pop culture and it is clear that “The borders between literature and real life vanished. Game and reality become as one”.12

It was the typical intertextual postmodern situation in our poetry, but in my opinion Estonian postmodernism did not play dangerous power games of political and social subversion at the end of the 1980s nor in the 1990s, but stressed the aspect of play. Ethnofuturism served the future of the nation but in the form of parody and pastiche, because ethnofuturism does not strive for ethnopreterism or the past of the nation, nor does it strive for cosmofuturism or the cosmopolitan. At the same time it must not be total parody, because separate authors represent more than one of the aspirations: for example Kauksi Ülle inclined more toward ethnopreterism. She focused on folklore. Karl Martin Sinijärv, who inclined more toward cosmofuturism or cosmopolitan, exhibits the opposite tendency. In the poetry of each, one trend dominated, the ethnopreteristic or cosmofuturistic respectively. Together they provided a balance in the movement of ethnofuturism and in (postmodern) society as well.

One of the brilliant voices of ethnofuturism is a young poet writing under the pseudonym Contra. He is a peasant and postman, who lives in the country. He publishes his own books and appears in his own poems. Folklorists say that he is a modern folk singer. For example his collection of poems “Tarczan” (1998), in which an allusion to the Tarzan story contains an intertextual pattern, leads the reader from literature to the problems of social life in Estonia. Contra uses both folklore and popular songs in his poetry. His work does not fit into the previous tradition of Estonian poetry, in which artistic poetry and folklore are strictly separated from each other. Contra’s Tarczan poems are an imitation of Estonian alliterative verse and contain an allusion to the Estonian epic poem “Kalevipoeg”. Tarzan and Tarzan’s son are not in opposition, but rather parallel each other. Tarzan is a wild man as is our national hero Kalevipoeg (Kalev’s son).

Contra lowers both mythic figures and demonstrates that we need a new paragon: neither mass cultural and cosmopolitan Tarzan nor old national Kalevipoeg is suitable. In our time we need a different kind of identity that does not represent the wild man, the wild life nor brutal power. Contra’s poems demonstrate clearly that ethnofuturism creates verses which are neither national nor international, nor cosmopolitan - this is the soft opposition between national and international in ethnofuturism15, and at the same time the bridge between national and international in Estonian poetry. It is a bridge which is directed toward the future, and demonstrates that Estonians do not live only in the present.

At the beginning of the 1990s, poetry dominated Estonian literature. It leaned toward the local or national. Although at the end of the 1990s and at the beginning of the 2000s, language experiments continue, as in Estonian prose, cosmopolitan tendencies arise more and more often in Estonian poetry. The picture is variegated at the beginning of the new millennium. Some poets declare that they are ethnofuturists or, as they have restyled themselves, ethnopunk poets. The Tartu group NAK (Olavi Ruitlane, Aapo Ilves, Veiko Märka, Jaan Pehk, Contra, Wimberg) come immediately to mind. But the symbols employed in ethnofuturism, while generally connected to cosmopolitan tendencies, deploy over a wide spectrum.

At the end of the 1990s, technical aspects in literature, in connection with computers and web pages, and different technical possibilities for publishing and creative work gained prominence. I think that Estonian poetry inclines more toward the cosmopolitan or cosmofuturism or to the international. The aspects of future and international are more stressed than the aspects of national or the aspect of ethno. For example, one interesting project was Mart Väljataga’s “Sada tuhat miljardit millenniumi sonetti” (“One hundred thousand billion sonnets for the millennium”) (2000). Mart Väljataga borrowed that idea from Raymond Queneau, who was a French experimenter and had his ribbon book published in 1960. There are ten finished Shakespearean sonnets in Väljataga’s book; to get one hundred thousand billion sonnets, a reader must combine the new sonnets with ribbons or verses, which may be cut from the second half of the book. In the book there are fourteen verses or ribbons.

Mart Väljataga’s experiment was more linguistic. The next example demonstrates that visual effects became prominent in last year’s Estonian poetry. And once more international or cosmopolitan aspects or aspirations to the cosmopolitan were stressed. Our young poet and semiotician Valdur Mikita’s new collection Rännak impampluule riiki (A Journey to the State of Impamp-Poetry) (2001) connects linguistic experiments with pictorial play. Impamp translates as jumping –jack. It is naive play that stresses the aspects of the future and the international, when verbal poetry will be less popular and it will be simpler to look at pictures. Of course in this book the play is once again connected with irony: the titles of Mikita’s poems include “The Poetry of Licking”, “The Poetry of Rubbing”, “The Poetry of Smelling”. He also uses syllabic and sound effects; his poetry is similar to dada poetry from the beginning of the 20th century.

In my opinion the irony and play with foreign words, trademarks and other international symbols serves nationalism covertly, because the ironic aspect deconstructs the symbols of the cosmopolitan.

I have given only a few examples, but it is clear that Estonian poetry is moving towards the international or cosmopolitan and searching for opportunities to become as broad as Estonian prose. International symbols occur more frequently, but postmodern or ethnofuturistic irony balances the inclination toward the cosmopolitan. The movement of ethnofuturism played a major role in the innovation of Estonian poetry and helped to raise the profile of postmodern play and tolerance. At the same time it propagated the optimistic idea that a little nation has a future. The domination of international symbols and prose in literature demonstrated that the crises are over. National symbols primarily stress play and the search for new possibilities. Our identity is pulverized, differentiated and open: as in postmodern play, identity is in continuous flux, because irony and pastiche deconstruct and exclude stasis.

As ethnofuturism rose, as the article states, "a counterbalance to cosmofuturism" during the Soviet period, I think the model and concept has cultural potential in countering the current "cultural collectivization" we are facing as Baltic Finns and Europeans. Food for thought.

I wonder, do we have any ethnofuturist writers or poets in Finland today? Would Kai Murros count?

[The Ripper]

The Finnish-Estonian Society Tuglas has its own ethnofuturist webzine since 2000:

Illimar

[The Ripper]

I realize the article is a little dated.

The city of Perm in the European part of Russia has become a popular venue for culture vultures from all corners of Russia. These days it is playing host to a festival of ethno-futurism followers who have flocked for the “Kamva” Festival, underway from July 29th to August 1st.

Perm is hosting the “Kamva” Festival for the fifth time. The word ‘kamva’ is compiled of two Finno-Ugric roots which mean shaman and water respectively. As for ‘ethno-futurism’, the Director of the Festival Natalya Shostina has this to say.

Ethno-futurism throws a bridge between the past and future of contemporary ethnic culture. Historians and ethnographers picked a combination of the roots ‘ethnos’ and ‘futur’ to outline a path which they claim ethnic cultures should follow. After it appeared in Estonia in the 1980s, ethno-futurism made it to Russia’s Finno-Ugric regions creating a cultural space in each.

The Perm Region is home to 130 ethnic groups, and ethno-futurism arrived in it at the turn of the millennia. Finno-Ugric peoples traditionally settled down in the region and the festival is aimed at preserving their culture which is vanishing to no return. Folklore in particular is dying, no one can pick up on it. In four years the participants in the festival have succeeded in recording folk songs of the indigenous people of the Perm Region – the Komis, the Udmurts, the Maris, the Bashkirs, the Tatars and the Russians.

This festival will feature the presentation of 6 CDs with recordings of folk songs popular since the 16th century. The project perpetuates brilliant performers. The memory of them is of tremendous importance to us, since half of them are no longer with us.

The fifth “Kamva” Festival has been dubbed “The Fairy Kamva”. As globalization marches on to subdue ever more cultures, the artistic community goes underground but the art itself stays on.

Perm ethno-futurism followers will have to go underground too. There is no room for them in the ambitious cultural projects launched by the city authorities. As a result, the “Kamva” Festival is being held for the last time. There will be no more elderly ladies dancing side by side with Tibetan monks, no Russian spiritual verses alternated with jazz and rock-n-roll.

Undoubtedly, the artistically minded ethno-futurism community will go on to seek a balance between the old and the new but they will have to keep a lower profile and their chances for public gatherings will be much fewer than before.

http://english.ruvr.ru/2010/07/30/13945428.html

I wonder, which contemporary Baltic Finnish artists could be viewed as 'ethnofuturist'?

[The Ripper]

Found another essay on the roots and nature of ethnofuturism.

ETHNOFUTURISM, POLITICS AT THE GRASS ROOTS LEVEL

Heie Treier

There has been a lot of discussion about multiculturalism, postcolonialism and the Other in Anglo-American art criticism of the 1990s. In the Estonian context this discourse has nothing to do with communities of people with different skin colour; the discussion has centered on coping with our own history and existence, as a small nation belonging to Finno-Ugric family of languages, "the Other", and the minority in whose collective psyche there is an ingrained fear of being assimilated and of losing our identity in our own homeland. Looking at the problem more widely, there are many small Finno-Ugric nations living in the territories of Russia, Sweden and Norway. Recently, strong warning signals have reached the international media from the Finno-Ugric community in the state of Mari-El,, in Russia. In connection with the visit to Finland of the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, the chairwoman of the Mari Union, Nina Maksimova, wrote an open letter to Tarja Halonen, President of Finland, on 2 August 2005, describing the Presdient Markelov’s dictatorship there in some detail and entreating her earnestly to inform Putin of the true situation.1

I should also like to refer to the special report from Mari-El and Tallinn which was published in The Economist on 20 December 2005: "But the hard-pressed Finno-Ugric minorities in central Russian regions such as Mari-El, Komi and Udmurtia are more concerned. To them, Estonia, with its regained statehood, is a miracle, and Finland an enviable superpower. For the Finno-Ugric languages of the minorities in Russia are dying and are now spoken mainly by old people in the countryside and a handful of intellectuals. There are few books, newspapers, radio or TV programmes and there is little education in the mother tongues, It is Russian that signifies culture and civilisation; the local lingo, for many, is useless peasant gobbledegook. That would have been Estonia's fate too, had the Soviet Union not collapsed in 1991."2

Ethnofuturism is a grass-root-level politics of survival, created by Finno-Ugric artists and writers; it’s also an academic discourse.3 By 2000 it had become a movement with its own philosophy, to quote Prof. Kari Sallamaa from the University of Oulu, in Finland4; also, papers have been written on the subject in Finnish and Udmurt universities. It has acquired a special meaning for the cultural awareness of the Finno-Ugric peoples living in Russia.

Estonian Kostabi Society

The concept of ethnofuturism was formulated in 1989 by the young Estonian poet, Karl Martin Sinijärv (b. 1971), the grandson of the futurist poet, Erni Hiir. It carried the spirit of liberation and optimism of the ‚Singing Revolution’ of 1988, which signalled/heralded [?] the collapse of the Soviet Union. Young Tartu writers, including Sinijärv, Kauksi Ülle, Sven Kivisildnik and Valeria Ränik felt they were standing on the threshold of a new age and were in search of a new literary slogan. Ethnofuturism was at first applied to poetry and fiction, and then extended to cover regional and international political aspirations and aesthetics, with an emphasis on ethnographic motifs, nature and old beliefs, mixed with the experience of contemporary high-tech society.

Estonian ethnofuturistic poets and writers did not limit themselves to contacts in the east and in the north; they founded the Estonian Kostabi Society in 1989, named after Kalev Mark Kostabi (b. 1960), the controversial 29-year old artist, living in New York, who founded the painting factory à la Warhol, called Kostabi World, in 1987. His parents had immigrated to the USA in the 1940s after the war, when the Soviets had occupied Estonia. Kostabi was viewed as a mythical media figure, a contemporary shaman whose first name, Kalev (etymological meaning – "strong") was the same as that of the Estonian national hero (epic "Kalevipoeg"). Kalev Mark Kostabi's relationship to Estonia may also be perceived in his art – for example, he has taken some family photographs as the basis for a number of paintings and given a more general meaning to certain symbols or motifs, such as dancers, spheres and details of folk costumes, in a kind of metaphysical space à la de Chirico.5 In October 1991, after Estonia's de facto and de jure declaration of independance, the young poets in Tartu launched Kostabi, an anarchic cultural newspaper (editor-in-chief: Indrek Särg), which appeared only at irregular intervals, but originally had a print run of 10,000 copies. This paper was sponsored by the Open Estonia Foundation, the Ministry of Culture and a private sponsor [OR: ‚private sponsors’?], and 45 issues had been published in the period up to 1993, when it closed down for financial reasons. This is an unusual chapter in Estonian media history.

In 1994 the first international conference of ethnofuturism was organised in Tartu (a university town in Estonia) by the Estonian Kostabi Society and other institutions, financed by the Open Estonia Foundation and George Soros, who was a follower or Karl Popper's concept of ‚The Open Society’. Soon Piret Viires spread the message among international colleagues6 and Kauksi Ülle discovered that she was called "the mother of ethnofuturism" by her friends belonging to the small Finno-Ugric nations.7 Similar conferences and meetings have continued to be held, whether under the name of "ethnofuturism" or not - the last one, taking place in Mari-El, under the supervision of official Russian institutions, with the participation of a number of top politicians.

Theory and practice

Ethnofuturism is an interdisciplinary movement which looks at Finno-Ugric identity as a feasible and practicable reality, not as a "dead" archaeological / ethnographic / folkloristic / anthropological / linguistic topic for research, of interest only to a limited number of dedicated scholars. For this reason, it is openly at variance with the old modernist paradigm of the Soviet Union, with its emphasis on universality and globalism, when progress was regarded as one of the key elements of ideology, up to the end of the 1980s. The colonial attitude to national minorities and smaller nations had given rise to the notion that they should abandon their claims to independence, in the interests of "progress", which was regarded as an objective, scientifically proven, fact. To illustrate this, we should mention the Chukchi anecdotes, popular in the 1980s all over the Soviet Union, in which the Chukchis, as members of ‚primitive’ peoples, came to embody foolish thinking and conduct. The separate nations (including the Russian nation) were deprived of their past and their future and indocrinated, instead, with the concept of the "Soviet people", with a new past and a new future constructed and controlled by the communist régime.

In the postmodernist age of the 1990s ethnofuturism sought to return power, future and self-confidence to those who had been dominated, although it was aware of the theoretical impossibility of this aim. But if any identity is a construct, it can be consciously shaped, by a variety of means. For example, in 1994 the Udmurt artist Yuri Kutshyran (b. 1962) created the first ever national flag and coat of arms for the Udmurt people, based on the symbolism of birds. When the collective psyche needs strengthening, artists seem to create flags in other contexts as well – David Hammons created a US flag in African colours (red, green, black) at the end of 1990s, and Eddie Chambers created a British flag in African colours (yellow, red, green). Another method is to play an actuivem, rather than passive role, by renaming people, places and things. Yuri Kutchyran’s official family name of in his passport is the Russian-sounding ‚Lobanov’, so when he renamed himself and his friends, he was taking a clear stand on the issue of personal identity. In Estonia there have been attempts to promote the written Võru language (spoken in Southern Estonia) alongside the national standard, based on the North Estonian dialects. In the late 1990s, a Võru-language ABC [?}was published, the Võru Institute was established, and so on. In 2000, the Axel Gallen-Kallela museum in Espoo near Helsinki, in Finland, mounted an "Ugriculture" exhibition of contemporary Finno-Ugric artists, whose thinking was derived from their ethnic identity.8

The art of contemporary Komi, Mari, Udmurt and Ersa artists draws on the experience of a village society which worships nature, performs sacrificial rituals and believes in myths. For example, the father of the Komi artist, Pavel Mikushev (b. 1962), was a respected bear hunter who enjoyed a high status in the village hierarchy. Paintings by Mikushev depict the bear as a cult animal. The Komi artist, Yuri Lisovski (b. 1964), draws intricate ornamental "Seals of the Universe" which resemble mandalas, exploring the iconography of folk patterns, as well as visual traditions including folk dress, rock paintings and the archaeological Permic animal style. The mythological cult animals are bees, reindeer, fish, bears and snakes, and these are repeated, for example, in the bear paintings of the Mari artists, Sergei Yevdokimov (b. 1961) and Aleksandr Ivanov (b. 1964). The Ersa artist, Yuri Dyrin (b. 1967), depicts fairy-tale and dream-like visions, in bright colours.

Some Finno-Ugric artists, such as Yuri Kutchyran, have taken up performance art, in a style reminiscent of ancient rituals. It resembles a form of shamanistic culture, with its fusion of Russian Orthodox elements, inherited archetypes and a feeling of harmony with village life and its closeness to nature. There are no career prospects in the villages, so the young people move to the cities, but the culture of the cities is the Russian culture. That is why the Finno-Ugric scholars led by Rein Taagepera, a professor in the USA, consider that the key issue in the survival of Finno-Ugric cultures is the creation of an urban language and culture. In their analysis of the ways in which the city is depicted in modern Udmurt literature, the critics Viktor Shibanov and Nadezhda Kondratyeva conclude that the city carries mostly negative connotations - it is depicted as a chaos, a ‚no-world’, indicative of alienation and emptiness, in contrast to the cosmic harmony of country life.9

While smaller, premodern village societies have to deal with the enormous problems of survival and identity and draw on their collective beliefs and rituals, larger, postmodernist nations in information societies have to tackle the problems of loneliness and soullessness, in a materialist environment. The suicide rate is alarmingly high in Finno-Ugric societies. Premodernist and postmodernist messages coalesce, and there is a surprising discovery, on a purely human level, that the divide is not so great, after all.

By 2005 world politics had drastically changed, in comparison to the 1990s. To quote the article of 20 December in The Economist once more: "After Mr Putin said recently that foreign-financed groups should be subject to strict scrutiny by the Russian security agencies, a website with close ties to officialdom, www.news12.ru , said that pro-Mari pressure groups would now be investigated further (the site also accused “Estonian nationalists” of stoking riots in Paris). Yet the Finno-Ugric axis in world politics seems more like a curiosity than a conspiracy." 10

http://www.aica-int.org/IMG/pdf/09.treiereng.pdf

Literary and artistic cultural movements like ethnofuturism are something European preservation as a whole and Finnic preservation in particular needs. One only needs to be reminded of the period of national awakening in the 19th century, the abundance of art and literature being produced to inspired by and to inspire developing national identities.

Besides, ethnofuturism as a movement sounds hella cool.