Valdur Mikita and the return of the real: In search of any-spaces-whatever in Estonian forests

Around the turn of the millennium, a paradigm shift took place in Western arts and humanities. (Post)structuralism, which had focused on language, the signifier, the epistemological, receded, and both academic and artistic attention turned to the real, the material, the ontological, the object, or the so-called “thingin- itself ”. In Estonia, discussions of this shift started as recently as in the 2010s, and then mostly in the context of art and ethnology; however, in retrospect, changes in this direction can be observed earlier and also in other areas of life. The work of the author Valdur Mikita, who had started to write in the 1990s and became extremely popular in Estonia in 2013, is a characteristic example of this paradigm shift. The shift from language games to the real is illustrated by Mikita’s interest in what Gilles Deleuze has called ‘any-spaces-whatever’.