Author of the text: Rasmus Kristofer Randla, October 2025
In August 2025, the mural “The War of Mahtra” painted by Andrus Kasemaa was dismantled from the wall of the hall of the former collective farm center, today’s village center, in the village of Peri, located near Põlva. The work took place as part of the summer internship of the Estonian Academy of Arts’ Cultural Heritage & Conservation Department and the Pallas students of the Pallas University of Applied Sciences.
There were several reasons for removing the mural. First, half of the collective farm center has already been depreciated, and finding a reasonable function for such a large building has proven hopeless. The village plans to move the center to the adjacent manor-era barn building, which is smaller and the village would be able to manage. The collective farm center will likely be demolished in the coming years, and therefore it was important to remove Kasemaa’s mural from the house before it was destroyed during the demolition work. An even more important reason, however, was the fact that the mural was already in a dilapidated condition before the work began. Since the rooms behind the wall with the panel have not been heated for years, the plaster was almost completely detached from the silicate brick wall in places and large cracks ran through the painting. Therefore, in January 2025, a fabric was glued to the panel to hold the layers of painting together.
Because the panel was so badly detached from the wall, it was possible to remove almost the entire painting, although it was originally planned to save only the most important groups of figures. This is unusual, as normally removing plaster from a wall is very time-consuming and would not have been realistic in practice.
The panel had to be divided into 37 pieces to make it possible to remove it from the wall. Most of the pieces were cut to a size of 1200x1800mm, but there were also smaller pieces, especially around the openings for the cinema projection integrated into the panel. The pieces were designed so that the cutting lines would interfere with the composition of the painting as little as possible. The painting was removed together with the plaster layer underneath, for which the pieces had to be sawed off the wall with a circular saw. The plaster could be sawed off from the back with steel wire. The loose pieces of plaster were lifted off the wall with a metal frame made for this purpose. Once the pieces were off the wall, they were reinforced on the back and new supporting backgrounds made of Tycroc board were added, as the plaster itself would have been too weak. The final step of the work was to remove and retouch the glued fabrics.
After the student internship in August, another workshop was held in September, during which the unfinished work was completed. By now, all the pieces have been removed from the wall and all but three pieces have been repainted, but the retouching is still in progress. The work is planned to be completed in the next workshop on November 7.
The fact that the entire panel was able to be removed from the wall has proven to be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, saving almost the entire painting is of course a fantastic result, but it also means that all 37 pieces now have to find a new home. Exhibiting the entire composition in its entirety does not seem realistic – it is still a work of almost 60 square meters. According to current plans, the work will be distributed across several locations.
The group of people on the western wall of the panel will be moved to the new village center, as Kasemaa has depicted people from the Peri collective farm there (e.g. the chairman of the collective farm, Hans Kaarna, and the construction foreman of the collective farm, Vello Laugamõts), so this part of the painting has historical value for many villagers, and this part is also small enough to fit comfortably in the new village center. The Põlva Cultural Center is also interested in exhibiting some of it, but there is no firm plan yet – how many and which pieces, exactly. It is hoped that a new home will be found for the pieces in a workshop-seminar on November 8, to which representatives of the local community and experts in the field have been invited. At the same time, there are plans to create a temporary exhibition where artistic solutions can be offered on how to exhibit the work in new spatial contexts and in a new form.
