Avantourists brings together Estonian authors Berit Renser and Terje Toomistu to share the passion of experiencing different realities and reality in difference.

Terje Toomistu is currently a PhD student in University of Tartu in the department of Ethnology. Her main interests, both in academic life and as a freelance film-maker, writer and photographer, are various cross-cultural processes, culturally framed meanings, gender, queer and memory studies, psychedelia.  She holds double MA degrees (cum laude) in Ethnology and in Media and Communication. Her research themes are framed by phenomenological sociology and interpretive anthropology. Her current major research projects are about Indonesian transgender community and about hippie movement in Soviet Estonia.

Berit Renser is currently based in Melbourne, Australia, while also studying tourism and hotel management in University of Tartu Pärnu College. She holds MA degree in Semiotics from University of Tartu. She was the leading the Let’s Do It World project in the city of Yogyakarta in 2011-2012. At the moment she’s writing a book about her experience in Indonesia.

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We share because we want to multiply perspectives. We try to see what is out there within the actual social reality, while addressing global problems on a grass-root level through the eyes and voices of local people. We are talking about politics that is constantly around us in all spheres of life, culture, religion, everywhere, constructing the way people tend to see the world. We are talking about transformation, we are talking about alternatives.

And yet we try to grasp the tiny bit of authenticity that is left, to discover ancient knowledge in indigenous cultures as much as new knowledges of modern lifestyles, to show the other way, to open some spiritual realms, to share our personal experiences.

If not that, then at least we try to show what seems intriguing and beautiful for us in this colourful turbulent chaotic world. Open it up.