Connections weave us together – BIRGEJUPMI General Assembly in Tartu

The General Assembly in Tartu was the second face-to-face meeting of the whole consortium since the beginning of the BIRGEJUPMI project and celebrated the end of its first year. The first meeting, the kick-off of the project, was held in Guovdageaidnu, on the Norwegian side of Sápmi right when the project started in January 2025. In the meanwhile, several members met at conferences, festivals, seminars etc. presenting or representing BIRGEJUPMI, or by doing fieldwork together at different locations in Sápmi and Kalaallit Nunaat.

The General Assembly in Tartu featured a rich programme from early morning to late evening, filled with our different Work Package presentations and engaging exercises of who we are and where we stand in this consortium.

On Tuesday, we made an excursion to the quite new and remarkable Eesti Rahva Muuseum (Estonian National Museum), where we enjoyed a curator-led tour of  the exhibition “Echo of the Urals” and got familiar with Uralic people’s languages and cultures. The museum was grand and symbolically placed on the ground of an abandoned Soviet airport. As we found ourselves only 40 km from the Russian border, some of us also had a feeling of geopolitical urgency.

In the evenings, we saw two films. On Tuesday, we watched the film Biru Unjárga (My Father’s Daughter). This choice felt natural to us, as we have members in BIRGEJUPMI who are from Unjárga. It was an interesting film about finding one’s place and identity, and very fitting with the themes our team working in Work Package 4 engage with. On Wednesday evening we saw another film, Land of Love. The documentary film introduced Yuri Vella, a Forest Nenets reindeer herder and poet from Western Siberia, Russia. After watching the documentary, we had a discussion with the filmmaker Liivo Niglas and our member Stephan Dudeck, who shared their memories and experiences with Yuri Vella.

The venue of our General Assembly also felt very fitting to host our meeting as the building is honoured to a particular horse, with a fresco of it on the wall outside of the building. This honouring of a horse acted as a symbol for one of the aims of BIRGEJUPMI; seeing nature (e.g. animal activities) and culture (e.g. human activities) as a unity, as the history of the building included the history of the horse and its owner.

On Thursday, we had the chance to share our work and project with colleagues from the University of Tartu, where the meeting was hosted. It was a truly wonderful occasion to exchange thoughts and ideas as we move into our second year of the project.

We warmly and sincerely thank our hosts at the University of Tartu, Art Leete and his Arctic Studies Lab together with colleagues from the Institute of Cultural Research, especially Helen Hanni, for your warm welcome, dedication, care, and organizational efforts that made our General Assembly both possible and memorable.

It is a rare and valuable opportunity for all of us to gather in one place at the same time. Our work packages represent a wide variety of aims, interests and possibilities – and so do we as participants and consortium. Being able to connect in person across different work packages in the same place once in a while is therefore especially enriching. Most of us only wished that we had more time together as it quickly became clear how much we thrive with and in our BIRGEJUPMI consortium.