Station Narva makes the city its main character

In a review for ERR, Janek Murd writes that the ninth Station Narva festival presents Narva as its main character: a bright, diverse and constantly changing city.

Station Narva is worth visiting on foot, along the beautiful riverside promenade beneath the old bastions. The festival is well suited to anyone who wants to walk, with its programme spread across the city and offering much more than music.

Murd studied the festival programme carefully and tried to build a schedule that would allow him to see as much as possible. Station Narva includes so many other events that they could form a full programme of their own, with music left out entirely. Several events not included in the festival pass sold out despite their 20 euro ticket price.

The curated city festival can be entered through several different gateways, each offering a different view of it. Even visitors who happen to be in Narva without specifically attending the festival can take part in the energy filling the city.

The festival has several starting points. Although it initially appears to begin on Friday, the programme continues to expand, so Murd decided to arrive on Thursday.

At three in the afternoon, rain is ending and the sun is about to emerge. Participants receive headphones, through which dark ambient music begins to play. Over it, a gentle young woman’s voice, with a slight Russian accent, says: “Close your eyes. Feel your body. Then feel the whole space around you. Feel the buildings and the landscape. Feel the people around you.”

Murd tries to follow the instructions. A few other people have come to the meditative sound journey Kreenholm Revelation. He already knows the buildings: large, red-brick and massive structures belonging to what was once Europe’s largest textile manufactory and now stands empty.

“Open your eyes!” the guide suddenly interrupts the music. She does this several more times during the journey as the group moves on.

The voice asks whether the participants can imagine the vast emptiness of the buildings, the plants that have taken over the rooms, and the corridors and halls where people are no longer present. The souls of those who left are somewhere, as are their memories. Yet the place is not dead, the voice says, but alive.

The music by Aleksandr Žedelov also changes during the sound journey. At times, it seems as though the ambient sound is born directly from the hum of power lines. Sounds resembling radio interference break through, while somewhere wind blows across a cold, open field and a violin laments.

At the Narva River, the group is asked to remove its headphones, remain silent and listen for children’s voices from the opposite bank. Russia is frighteningly close. At that moment, this is no longer simply meditative listening, and the other side of the river is no longer just another bank. No children’s voices can be heard.

The text gives Kreenholm a voice of its own. It asks to be renovated and promises to serve for another thousand years. The work also raises the idea of two histories and tells the story of a grandmother. Murd begins to wonder whose memories he is actually hearing. The work’s author, Finnish artist Miia Kettunen, has a grandmother who, according to the story, worked at Kreenholm.

The answer lies in the work’s origins. During her residency in Narva, Kettunen took walks with local people, who wrote down their connections to Kreenholm, the landscape and the past. The “I” in the sound journey is therefore not necessarily the voice of one person, but a meeting point for local memories, the author’s text and her imagination.

Beside the river, where the old channel of the Narva River is now almost dry, the voice asks whether the water will return. If it came back and flowed strongly again, it would offer hope.

During the meditation, the guide repeatedly taps a watch with her finger and tries to increase the pace, but the sound journey still runs 15 minutes over time. With the opening concert at the Rugodiv cultural centre due to begin half an hour later, the group has to hurry.