Karelia, International with Monument

First part of a diptych dedicated to Karelia, a border region between Finland and Russia, and the homeland of the Karelians. Duque‘s essayist narrative portrays moments where the real and the fantastic of a culture come into conflict, “a hallucinated history of Karelia where different layers of time converge”. Karelia - which has belonged to Sweden, the Republic of Novgorod, Finland and Russia - is a region of contrasts due to its border dimension, cradle of Finnish literature and memory space of the wars and repressive policies of the last century. A family from a remote village preserves the vestiges of their ancestral and shamanic-culture; on the other side, the testimony of the daughter of a historian currently in prison. Both stories reflect and criticises Putin’s current actions to rewrite the history of Russia.