U IS FOR ULTIMA THULE
There is the same number of display cases as there are chapters in the book, each one filled with the objects his characters touched, the clothes they wore, the drinks they drank - there's even a wall with every cigarette the main female character smoked during the time of the novel, pinned and mounted like rare moths.
The Thule Koda in the town of Kuressaare on the Estonian island of Saaremaa doesn't have quite the same pedigree, but it takes as its starting point a similar question - what if you dedicate a museum to a work of fiction.
Is it still a museum? Or has it become an art gallery? What does calling it a museum do for the visitor experience that's different from calling it a gallery? We're being invited to treat what is presented to us as real. We know it's a fiction, but we act as if it's historical fact, and inevitably through the fiction, truths emerge.
All museums are fictions of a kind. Curators are carers of their collections, not their creators - but the work of the museum curator can be likened in some way to the work of the novelist or artist: selecting which facets of a subject to reveal, which to obscure. Setting scenes. Shaping narratives. Behind the truths, fictions lurk.
The Thule Koda's combined cinema and museum space takes as its premise the idea that the fabled island of Ultima Thule, at the furthest reaches of the ancient world, is in fact
the Estonian island of Saaremaa.
The precise location of Thule has been the subject of speculation since antiquity. It was described by the ancient Greek mariner
Pytheas in his record of a voyage north around 325BC, but his log has long been lost in the mists of time. Several islands are thought to be likely candidates, including Iceland, Shetland, the Faroes, and the Lofoten Islands of Norway. None has been proved.
The idea that Pytheas made it this far up the Baltic to chart the outermost limits of his voyage north was first suggested by Lennart Meri, in a book written many years before he became a leading figure in Estonia's independence movement and eventual Prime Minister.
The Thule Koda's developers
have taken this story and run with it, creating a bizarre hybrid
entertainment arena with a kids' playroom, a 360°
projection room, a
cafe/ bar, a plush cinema showing the latest Hollywood hits, and another permanently showing a dramatised account of Pytheas's travels.
But it's only when you reach the "museum" that the full oddness of the place really takes hold. The vast, dimly-lit exhibition space
is dotted with weird,
larger-than-life sculptures of mythical beasts - there's a selkie, familiar to this group from Scottish mythology. The others seem a bit random: various winged and horned horrors,
a ship-chomping stormbeast, a chicken with human breasts, etc.
The exhibition walks you through the story of Pytheas, his travels north and Meri's Estonian twist. There are various "museum objects"
representing the travels of Pytheas, every one of which - bar one - is described as a "reconstruction". The one "original" object on display is described perversely as an "Incomprehensible Object", a phrase that could easily stand for the Thule Koda as a whole. Whatever Meri's reasons for siting Ultima Thule in Saaremaa, it is beyond the capacity of this place to articulate them.
I wanted to like the playfulness of Thule Koda and its crazy take on an ancient shaggy dog story, but everywhere are signs telling visitors "Don't believe everything you see" which just ruins the conceit. In a world of deep fakes and alternative facts, discerning the truths from within the lies becomes an ever more political act, as much as it has always been a literary one.