Lights out: practicing opacity in Estonian basements

Abstract

This essay engages with alternative regimes of invisibility by investigating the things that are kept, and the practices that take place in basements of eastern Estonia. The use of hiding infrastructures is here taken as part of wider claims about epistemic disobedience and resistance of any social control over our interiority. Ethnographic descriptions show the way placing things underground is an enactment of inattention at the intersection between different forms of value, temporality, and representation. The right to opacity is thus presented as a way of resisting the hegemonic terms of engagement, preserving diversity against the central modern gaze that constantly demands clarity and accountability.