“Conflict” is an artistic project that reconstructs conflicting images between the Soviet reality and tourism fantasy in Tallinn, the Estonian capital. In the city, images of the Old Town are represented as a national symbol and landmark in the context of global tourism. Different architecture, constructed since medieval period, is symbolized as authentic medievalness or Estonianness in consumer culture. Tourism marketing presents the architecture and the town itself as romantic and nostalgic signs. These signs of the city make it an exotic representation of Estonian city, which present a fantasy for foreign tourists. This routine to produce illusional images has been repeated within the tourist market system throughout the gradual transformation of the city.

However, the remaining former Soviet architecture and Soviet minorities are situated in a crisis of disappearing. The architecture is gradually vanishing, along with the past memory of collectivity in Tallinn, because the city is transforming by converting the traces of the Soviet Union into a commercial context. Unlike the romantic city landscape of the Old Town, in reality the Soviet minorities suffer from the loss of memory, through the historical decay of Soviet architecture brought about due to nationalism and capitalism. In this city, the remaining Soviet and consumer culture are in conflict. After the Soviet Union collapsed, Linnahall, a public space constructed during the Soviet period, has been in semi-ruin. Some industrial factories which evoke memories of communal production have also been ruined or transformed to commercial places as Estonian land property shifted from state-owned land to privatization. Currently, both the remaining Soviet material traces and minorities in Tallinn are neglected by dominant ideologies of nationalism and capitalism.

This contradictory situation between the Soviet and medieval traces occurs in conflicting social space between collectivity and privatization. Following this context of cultural conflict on specific sites and reflecting on my personal experience as a temporary outsider and a traveler, this project aims to reveal a contradiction of Tallinn landscape through a work of film. It asks: How are Soviet traces transformed and how do they disappear in conflicting social space? How can contradictory images from the space be presented through film?

This thesis is composed of two parts: cultural research and artistic practice. The cultural research part investigates the socio political collision arising from historical and spatial transition as a research context through interviews, filming images and literature review. In other words, this part discusses ruined Soviet traces, such as Linnahall, factories and excluded soviet minorities as well as commercial tourism places, such as Old Town and churches in Old Town. In the artistic research part, the concept of conflict is based on Sergei Eisenstein’s film theory of montage. Eisenstein defined montage as a conflict to create new meaning through a dialectic approach of a film form. The conflict as montage uses the dialectic principle for creating dynamics. As the fundamental condition to create dynamics, different film elements need to be superimposed in contradictory relation.

Following this sense, this principle of conflict is applied and extended to creating a film work through superimposing different moving images. The moving images used as elements for montage are created through two approaches, that are a departure from the theatrical approach of filmmaking used by Eisenstein. The first approach is improvisational shooting, without plot or planning. The second is to reuse existing film elements by detouring. Both ways intend to change the natural original context to another through montage. This extended montage is used as a tool for revealing conflicting images from the cultural research part: old and new, insider and outsider, local and global in contradictory relation between Soviet traces and current transformed landscape, which is superimposed to create new meaning.