Flo Kasearu (*1985 Pärnu, EE)

Uprising 14 & 17, acquired by the EPO art collection in 2022

Each project by Flo Kasearu begins with an open-ended game, in which the artist tends to dissect, explore, negotiate and celebrate the relationship between seriousness and humour, severity and wit. Kasearu, who lives in Tallinn, Estonia, often retrieves her materials and subject matter from various scenarios in everyday life. Her group of works entitled Uprising (2015-2018) includes drone footage shot during maintenance work on a building in Tallinn's Pelgulinn district. The metal removed from the roof during that work was reused and folded into forms like the paper aeroplanes that children often make. The results can be seen in the framed artefacts mounted here on the wall and, on a larger scale, in the video. The footage begins with the kind of peacetime skyline views that might be observed one sunny, autumnal day above almost any leafy European suburb.

The forms created may seem reminiscent of an air force’s rigid show of military might, but at the same time suggest an exit strategy, the crossing of national borders by air or even questions of both immigration and emigration. The mildly absurd scenario of the planes, nose-to-nose on either side of the rooftop in the video, sinisterly suggests deadlock while leaving the roof cavity exposed to the elements. This is one of several works by Kasearu that responded at the time to tense international relations between Russia and the West. Today, these works might be read as a preface to the devastation wrought in Ukraine, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths and more than 8.1 million refugees by the beginning of 2023, most of them women and children, as well as 5.3 million people internally displaced in the country.

Yet they are also works of resilience. The building from which the metal came is both the family home of the artist and the site of the “Flo Kasearu House Museum,” where many more of her works can be seen, including those that explicitly suggest an ethics of sustainability through the use and reuse of locally available materials and do-it-yourself projects. More generally, these artworks often reflect on Estonia's post-Soviet heritage and capitalist reality, as well as some of the difficulties that accompany both. Perhaps today, above all, we gain from Uprising the sense that sustainability will never be achieved without peace.