Tallinn
visited 2014
There is a wonderful museum in the Pelgulinn area of Tallinn. Usually house museums aim to show the life of a artist that used to live there, maybe even for just a short time a long time ago. There will be art historians and interpreters to suck as much information out of this span when the artist was here, to reveal it to those who are interested enough to visit. But this museum is different.
Flo Kasearu House Museum
The Flo Kasearu House Museum may look like any historic art museum, with the memory plaque on the wall and the opening hours on the entrance door. The only difference are the nice handles for locking your bike, and a stencil painting on the powerbox, that cannot really be that old. After knocking on the door, it is the artist Flo Kasearu that opens the door. She is also the one that shows me around in the museum, and she is also the one in the hilarious introduction video, and the one that made the six-language information folder.
Memory plaque:
FLO KASEARU HOUSE MUSEUM
In this house lives and works artist Flo Kasearu
Welcome to the museum!
Bike parking
Powerbox stencil
Collection of Rental Ads
The art of Flo Kasearu is spread around in the house, and the house with the garden itself is her work of art. There are actually people living in the different flats, represented in the pillory of those who are late paying their rent. And in the doorway are notes by people who want to move in. But the main person is the artist herself and her life and work in the house.
Pillory
The Garden of Adam
There is a domestic animal in the form of the word "mouse"/"hiir" running across a screen, the toilet doubles as a library, the staircase has been transformed to a slide, there is a fictious Creative Estonia factory in the basement, and the archives on the loft. Even the mythology is in place, in form of a tree hit by lightning that took the form of a paintbrush, thus a sign that there will be art in this house.
Mouse
Nightmares of the House Owner
Library
Grown Out
Mona Liisa meets Mona Lisa
Estonian Dream
Ars Longa Vita Brevis
Archive
Creative Estonia
Revelation
Museum Introductory Video
The idea is so brilliant and wonderful, and so well put to life and presented, the whole museum is a life-size, continous performance. The staircase is filled with drawings of the artists nightmares about the house: fire, lightning, gentrification, landslides, floods, alien attacks and more. I sincerely hope none of those will happen, while my biggest fear concerning the museum is that Flo Kasearu will one day get tired of being on display and close the doors of the museum.
