Vleeshal
Reproducing the Practices
of our Ancestors:
A Sensory History of
Forgetting and Remembering
24 June 2025
Vleeshal
Weaving Worlds:
Adopting and
Adapting
Traditional Craft
24 June 2024
The image: Darali Leli
Udmurt dress with prison jargon
Site specific work on the place of labor camp Lokchimlag
Photo by Revolt Center
Aisha: The primary imperial violence is that we have forgotten ourselves. Poet Ross Gay once said that for the ancestors of many of us, the apocalypse has already happened. The apocalypse — the death of worlds, ways of life, worldviews, and practices — is something we experience on a bodily level. For some Central Asian peoples, this occurred when we were forcibly sedentarized.
Milana: The Circassians had a special connection with trees, one that was largely forgotten and lost due to the Russo-Caucasian War of 1763–1864 and colonization. Like sacred trees, Circassian gardens were cut down to make way for new fortresses and roads during the war. Only isolated descriptions of Circassian gardens have survived, mostly not from locals, but from visiting travelers, researchers, and Russian generals who arrived in the Caucasus during the war.
I do not want to idealize the Circassians — we had slavery, human trafficking, and betrayals. But the people who created these gardens — how must they have felt the soil, the land, the air, to integrate so deeply with this environment? There are only a few photographs left, but even they reflect how humans and trees are two sentient, interconnected beings.
Circassian gardens were integrated into the ecosystem — forests, landscapes, birds, animals, and insects. The forest always remained dominant. The gardens provided sustenance, but knowing how to tend them required coordinated collective work and knowledge that was acquired and passed down over time. Anyone who entered the forest had to perform certain rituals. There was a shared body of knowledge and rules that shaped everyone’s life. It was a kind of ecostate. Why can’t Circassian gardens become a shared, universal experience that serves as a model for building the future?
Unfortunately, I cannot discuss Circassian gardens and our traumas from home.
The image: Darali Leli
Udmurt dress with prison jargon
Site specific work on the place of labor camp Lokchimlag
Photo by Revolt Center
Darali: I have experience working in the Udmurt gymnasium. Imagine its museum. How do we tell the story of Kuzebay Gerd, the namesake of this gymnasium — a national Udmurt leader and poet who was repressed and executed in the Solovki prison camp? The question is how to work with so-called “difficult heritage.” On the one hand, we need to talk to students about the SOFIN (Union for Liberation of Finno-Ugric Peoples) case and its consequences, but on the other hand, wouldn’t it be better to allow them to study and immerse themselves in these sad chapters of history?
Aisha: Speaking through beauty, through wisdom, through the alternative coexistence of people that we were made to forget — that is the kind of alternative approach that is more positive for today and the future. This is the history I would want to read to my hypothetical child. It is a history of beauty. Our people were not just warriors who could fight and had no human needs — they cultivated gardens and maintained them, and people of all genders were involved in this. How can we remember ourselves in everyday life, in work, in collective efforts, rather than as warriors from epic tales? What we do in our practices is to save and restore the worlds that were suppressed. Roland Vasquez and Saodat Ismailova have an interview in which they talk about how important it is to remember these worlds within us. This is what I want to do in my projects and why I choose craft practices.
The image: Darali Leli
Udmurt dress with prison jargon
Site specific work on the place of labor camp Lokchimlag
Photo by Revolt Center
Madina Tlostanova is a big hero for me because she gave me a language. In my understanding, she says: “Hey, how about jumping over this colonial period and going into the past, into the precolonial period, and spending time with our ancestors there, learning from them? What will happen then? What will we be able to remember?” She is assisted in this by the concept and practice of re-existencia, proposed by Adolfo Albán Achinte. This method involves reproducing the practices of our ancestors and seeing what information becomes available to us this way. These could be craft practices but also smells, tastes, and colors. Re-existencia consists of two parts, ‘resistance’ as an act of defiance and ‘existence anew’ as living in a different, new way.
All my practice is built on repetition, on reproducing what my ancestors did. Nomadic Central Asian people created their material world. How do we, as ancestors who create futures for those who come after us, remember within ourselves the creators, the dreamers, and the caretakers that our own ancestors were?
Milyausha: It reminds me how ethnofuturists say that in every village, they search for the inner Udmurtia. And once, thanks to a symposium they held, I visited the village where Albert Razin was born. It was so alive! The village collected and sold milk on a cooperative basis, hosted celebrations, and even had a musical ensemble. They do not intend to give up! Seeing such a village today is a rare joy.
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The image: Kuzebay Gerd
Kuzebay Gerd was a Udmurt poet, prose writer, playwright, translator, ethnographer, folklorist, and national and public figure. In 1937, he was repressed on charges of Udmurt nationalism and executed in the Solovki prison camp. Kuzebay Gerd became one of those repressed in the fabricated SOFIN case (Soyuz Osvobozhdeniya Finskikh Narodov — Union for Liberation of Finno-Ugric Peoples). According to various sources, between 28 and 31 people were repressed in connection with this case, including writers, poets, and ethnographers of Udmurt, Komi, Erzya, Mari, Mordovian, and Karelian descent.
Batyr is an honorary title among Mongol and Turkic peoples, given for military merit; it was also used in folklore to denote outstanding warriors. The term is widely used in the folklore of Turkic peoples and in everyday life as a personal name. The image of Mongol and Central Asian peoples as embodied by the “batyr” still prevails in colonial contexts, turning representatives of these peoples into idealized warriors, devoid of needs and capable of guarding the empire’s borders.
Albert Razin was a Udmurt activist and scholar dedicated to preserving and promoting the Udmurt language. On 10 September 2019, he committed an act of self-immolation in protest of the law that proposed making the study of minority languages, including Udmurt, voluntary, which threatened to reduce the number of Udmurt speakers. The motto he held bore a quote from the Dagestani poet and writer Rasul Gamzatov, “If my language disappears tomorrow, I am ready to die today.”
