I Have Been Going to Viljandi Folk Since I Was a Kid

I have been going to Viljandi Folk since I was a kid, which makes it difficult to think about it as a festival in the same way I think about other festivals. Most festivals are places you decide to visit. Viljandi Folk was already there before I had much of an opinion about anything. It arrived every summer and changed the town for a few days, then disappeared again.

I do not remember the first concert I saw there. I remember fragments instead. The badges. People sitting on the grass. Instruments I could not name. The sudden feeling that Viljandi had become much larger than it normally was. Streets that were usually quiet became full of people who seemed to know where they were going. There were tents, queues, food smells, costumes, drunk adults, tired children, and music coming from places where there usually was no music.

As a child, I did not think of any of this as design. It was just what happened.

Now I look at it differently. The festival is a temporary system placed on top of the town. It changes how people move, where they stop, what they notice, who they talk to, and what parts of Viljandi become important. A hill becomes a concert venue. A courtyard becomes a meeting point. A path that normally leads somewhere becomes a place where people sit for an hour.

For a few days, the town has a different interface.

I think this may be one of the earliest places where I learned that an environment can change behaviour without anyone explicitly telling you what to do. You follow the sound. You notice where other people are gathering. You understand that someone wearing a festival badge belongs to the same temporary world as you. You accept that the normal rules of the town have been suspended, but only slightly.

It is strange to realise that some of the things I later became interested in through interaction design were already present there. Rituals, navigation, identity, temporary communities, access, memory, atmosphere. Even the way the festival represents cultures from other places is a form of interface. For many people, a short concert in Viljandi may be their first encounter with a region, language, or musical tradition they previously knew nothing about.

That encounter is never neutral. Someone decides which artist is invited, how they are described in the programme, what photograph is used, which stage they perform on, and what the audience is expected to understand. A living culture can become a forty-five-minute experience between buying food and walking to the next concert. Sometimes that may create curiosity. Sometimes it probably turns something complex into an aesthetic.

I did not think about any of this as a child either. I just liked that Viljandi changed.

Maybe that is why I still find temporary places so interesting. Film festivals, hackathons, exhibitions, conferences, even airports during long transfers. They create short-lived social worlds with their own rules and rhythms. You enter, learn how to behave, and then the whole thing disappears. Viljandi Folk may have made this feel normal to me before I understood that most places do not regularly transform themselves.

There is also something unusual about returning to the same event while becoming a different person each time. The festival remains recognisable, but I do not. I first went there as a child. Later I became interested in film, websites, travel, music, interaction design, Taiwan, Indigenous cultures, and all the ways places explain themselves to outsiders. Each of those interests changes what I see when I return.

The festival has become a kind of measuring device. I can notice what I pay attention to now that I did not notice before. As a child, I saw crowds and music. Later I noticed the visual identity. Then the logistics. Then the programme politics. Now I am interested in how a small Estonian town briefly becomes a meeting point for people and traditions from places I have sometimes visited myself.

I have travelled very far from Viljandi and still keep finding ways back to the same questions.

How does a place preserve something without freezing it? What happens when tradition becomes a product people buy a ticket to experience? Who gets to represent a culture? How much explanation does an audience need? When does a festival create genuine connection, and when does it only create the feeling of one?

I am not sure Viljandi Folk answers any of these questions. It may be more important that it keeps producing them.

Raw Drafts is partly an attempt to understand experiences that shaped me before I had the language to describe them. Viljandi Folk is one of those experiences. I thought I was only attending a festival. I may also have been learning how temporary worlds are built.

Connected reading

• The City Is an Interface
• Every Event App Has a Different Theory of Why We Leave the House
• Raw Drafts Are a Form of Learning
• The Future Arrives as a Raw Draft

AI authorship note

This essay began with Kris Haamer saying that he has been attending Viljandi Folk since childhood, then asking how that long relationship connects to Raw Drafts. AI supported drafting, editing, and implementation. Kris supplied the autobiographical premise, redirected the essay toward the festival as a recurring system in his life, and approved it for publication.