1911
The building of Flo Kasearu Majamuuseum (Flo Kasearu House Museum) was built from 1908 to 1911.
The building of Flo Kasearu Majamuuseum (Flo Kasearu House Museum) was built from 1908 to 1911.
On the first floor (apartment on the right side of the entrance) a spice shop with a separate entrance was ran by Flo’s great-great-grandparents.
The couple lived in a small apartment behind the spice shop, renting out other six apartments in order to pay back the bank loan taken to build the house.
Flo’s great-grandmother Marta got married for the second time to a former war prisoner, Armenian charmer Vagan Sultanjan.
After the Second World War Estonia became a part of the Soviet Union and the house was nationalised by the new state (that happened to all the private property then). In fear of being deported to work camps of Siberia (as property and shop owners they were considered to be a part of the former bourgeoisie element threatening the new system) the couple fled the house to hide in the countryside for a year. At that time, because of the post-war housing shortage, the house was filled with new inhabitants.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the re-establishment of sovereign Estonia, one could give in a claim to have the property that was expropriated during the Soviet occupations, restituted to the successors of original lawful owners. Flo‘s great-grandmother Marta Sultanjan gave in the claim. After Marta’s death her husband Vagan and their son Vambola (Flo’s grandfather) took over managing the restitution process, and after their decease, it was Flo‘s mother‘s, alongside with other successors’ of Marta, turn to run it.
It took almost twenty years to process the restitution with the local municipality. In 2009, when the city was ready to hand the property over, Flo and her mother came to check the house.
What they found was an empty, vandalised house, and from the back yard, as a strange coincidence, they found two people and a van full of metal that had just been stolen from the house.
The so-called sitting tenants had moved out to municipal housing provided by the city, but nobody took the time to inform the owners about it, and the house had been neglected and a target for the thieves for some time.
In 2009 Flo, a young and poor art student, moved into the half-vandalised house, inviting friends to join her.
With her an artist Tõnu Narro moved in and from 2010 onwards he conducts a durational performance piece of fixing the house.
In 2011 and 2012 a collaborative art space called Tiib (Annex/Wing) was operating in the left side apartment of first floor (run by Flo herself, Andra Aaloe, John W. Fail and Lewis McGuffie).
On 24 April, 2013, Flo established Flo Kasearu House Museum, a site-specific project dealing with domesticity, home, institutionalisation and similar themes clearly sprouting from the artist’s daily struggle of being a house-owner, an artist and a mother at the same time.