The political life of post-industrial objects: aesthetic re-signification in the Russophone Estonia

The article discusses how material legacies of the past are conceptualized as cultural and artistic objects, and in this capacity inscribed into the contemporary Estonian political debates on security, identity, and borders. One section focuses on the city of Narva where the compound of the Kreenholm factory is located. Another part looks at industrial objects in smaller towns where the Soviet material heritage is intermingled with the EU-promoted environmental agenda, including the Green Deal project and the idea of just transition. research based on the methodology of visual analysis includes two specific groups of visual artefacts that are illustrative of linkages between locations, cultural meanings and their political reverberations.