Following Signs of Sentiment

In the summer of 2017, Kazakhstan’s capital city hosted a world exposition with “future energy” as its theme. The EXPO cultivated a chronotope of feeling, intertwining time, space, and affect. Hosts and visitors were asked to channel their energy to pull Kazakhstan into the future. Tropes of Kazakhstan as a vast, empty space formed the backdrop for the EXPO to emerge. This project aligns with ongoing efforts in Kazakhstan to not only cast its new capital city as futuristic but also expand on a broader Soviet modernizing project that—contrary to Cold War stereotypes of the region coming from the West—placed emotion at the core of its work. In this article, I argue that we follow signs of sentiment as publicly available semiotic resources for inciting and interpreting affective forces. Affect and semiosis do not emerge in a predetermined order. City planners deployed a range of signs of sentiment, from smiley faces to slogans, on the EXPO grounds and beyond. Signs of sentiment produced from above become grounds for reflection and stance taking regarding the relationships between the citizens and the state that produced unanticipated semiotic and sentimental responses. Governmental insistence on newness provokes comparisons with the past and prompts citizens to consider their own visions for Kazakhstan’s future.