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site-specific installation / intervention 

What is a space for a woman like, and where might such a space be? Flo Kasearu’s site-specific work is inspired by a pre-defined spatial situation: a 26 square metre walk-through room with five doors. It is a commentary on an archetypal situation where a woman has no right or opportunity to have a space of her own – her ability to occupy space is contingent and dependent on the circumstances. The fact that spatial relations require adaptations and agreements that are not usually considered important enough to define is emphasised by a standard marriage contract where “property” is replaced with the word “space”. This agreement, which defines spatial relations, presents the rules, norms, and legal discourse in terms of the most everyday, basic level of (co)habitation, such as the right and inevitability of a body to be in a space. As the work opens up a possibility to rent out the space while the exhibition is on, the work also reaches out of the museum into the public space, and the exhibition has a potential to mix with reality – the work provides an opportunity for an interested woman to inhabit, use and adapt these 26 walk-through square metres according to her needs and wishes.

Text by Ingrid Ruudi (curator of A Room of One’s Own. Feminist’s Questions to Architecture, Architecture museum, Tallinn)