Tales from the Estonian East is a visual and narrative zine that translates an academic ethnography into an accessible, tactile form. Drawing on fieldwork in Ida-Virumaa, Estonia’s eastern border region, it explores everyday life in places often portrayed as peripheral, polluted, or politically suspect.

Through stories, photographs, drawings, and short reflections, the zine focuses on “shadow-spaces” such as basements, garages and dachas, where people store memories, repair things and futures, and quietly negotiate belonging beyond the gaze of institutions.

The zine foregrounds small acts of care and secrecy: keeping things “for later,” growing food, decorating abandoned buildings, or gathering in garages. These practices reveal how opacity can function as ways of coping with extractivism, border politics, ecological damage, and cultural marginalization.

By blending ethnographic insight with a zine DIY aesthetic, Tales from the Estonian East invites readers to rethink what counts as political life, knowledge, and refusal, and to approach neglected regions not as failures to be fixed, but as places where other futures are quietly kept alive in the dark.

This zine is a small editorial sprint: a compact object designed to travel easily, read quickly, and still carry atmosphere. The goal was not to “summarize the book,” but to translate a set of its tones—shadows, concealments, ordinary infrastructures of privacy—into a printed artifact that could accompany a public moment (a talk, a launch, a room with people). In other words: not a flyer, not a catalogue, not “merch.” A zine as an interface.

This project invites anthropologists to expand and re-equip our ethnographic modes, improving our ways of engaging with contemporary publics while experimenting with alternative forms of doing anthropology.

Done with Talleres Minima of Santiago Orrego