In the first feature of this series, Michael Cole followed a trail of strawberries to naive artist and Tartu 2024 Cultural Ambassador Kairo Kliimand to try and find out more.

It was around fifteen years ago when Kairo Kliimand first "stumbled onto art making." "It wasn't a natural place for me, because I never wanted to be an artist," she confesses as we chat over a cup of red tea in her studio. "Then a little later, I got involved with a bad crowd and started vandalizing the streets of Tartu. I guess I vandalized it in a pleasant enough way that I was considered suitable to represent the hood I defaced."

A "naive artist, who also does streets," Kairo's form of "vandalism" was considered so pleasant in fact, that this year, she's one of Tartu 2024's cultural ambassadors – a select group of southern Estonians hand-picked to "spread the good news" that their hometown and region is Europe's cultural capital.

"It's very unofficial," she says. "They're like 'you do you,' we're not giving you any orders – just do what you're already doing." Still, she admits to getting a free Tartu 2024 t-shirt and hat, and there have been one or two official functions as part of the promotional campaign. "But you know that only goes so far. I already got paint on the shirt, and I don't remember the meals I had." 

Kairo's ambassadorial duties have however seen her dispatched to European hotspots like Berlin, alongside fellow members of top Estonian street art crew Stencibility to showcase their work. They've also been to Aberdeen in Scotland, where locals soon started noticing Kairo's stickers popping up around their town too.

You became famous in Aberdeen then? "For a brief moment," she says. "But a win's a win." "I would see photos of locals saying, 'hey, look at all these strawberries that are suddenly everywhere – I wonder what that's all about.'"

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So, what is that all about? After all, back home in Tartu, Kairo's individually hand-painted strawberry stickers in an array of vivid colors adorn every imaginable surface throughout town – trust me, I've checked.

Strawberries are Kairo's "tag, I guess, or the closest thing I have. But it's also just a very straightforward reference to Paul Kondas' 'The Strawberry Eaters.'" She first discovered that particular painting's "weird, trippy energy" during childhood, and it's stayed with her ever since. Kondas too was self-taught, but Kairo takes inspiration as much from his way of life as his style of art – the ethos of "blazing your own trail and not giving up. He was very flamboyantly painting on his patio for people to see that, 'hey, I am an artist.'"

[Kondas] "was probably talking about wedded bliss, romantic love or just the eroticism he was craving, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm just talking about naive art and the act of surviving as a naive artist," she says. The strawberry is "that boiled down, the smallest unit that can make sense on its own without knowing what the reference is, as a link to that painting. So, it's not really about the strawberry at all."

But still, the whole "Arts of Survival" theme around which Tartu 2024 revolves can feel "a little too on the nose," especially when you're creating work to sell so you can "buy food, pay for electricity and more art stuff, canisters and paint."

"It's not anything else – it is survival," Kairo says. "I do question whether making art is the thing that's keeping me alive, or the very thing that's slowly killing me. I think it's doing both probably," she smiles.

***

I'd first met Kairo a couple of years before in a small South Estonian town called Antsla. She was there to paint a roadside electricity box in her characteristic naive style during the Rural Urban Art Festival (RUA) and we talked briefly about the war in Ukraine. "And now you're drinking from an 'Antsla' mug," she says, pointing at the town's green and yellow logo on my cup of red tea. It was like she'd planned it all along.

I was aware that since Antsla, Kairo had been selling her work to raise money for Ukraine and, was curious to know how she felt the war fitted in with this whole Tartu 2024 "Arts of Survival" thing. "Well, that's a huge, huge topic," she says.

It was a snowy Wednesday in February, and Kairo decided to buy some tulips. Like most Estonians, she was getting ready for the next day, when her country would celebrate the 104th anniversary of its independence. "I didn't have a massive celebration planned, but it's nice to have fresh-cut flowers for the day," she says. Estonian Independence Day is February 24, and in 2022, any hopes of enjoying the occasion were quickly shattered. It was the day Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine began.

"In the first week, we didn't know how it was going to go. Are they invading us too? Is it a multi-pronged thing? (I was) crying, scaring my kids to death, like 'mommy are they coming to get us too?'" All across Estonia, Independence Day was permeated with sadness, anger and fear. It became "like a funeral mood, immediately – you just didn't know how many people were being buried."

As things in Ukraine got worse, Kairo kept looking at the tulips she'd bought, then at the news, then back at the flowers again, barely even seeing them "through the veil of worry." Eventually, she noticed them starting to wither. "As they wilted, I sort of made a deal with the flowers – when you wilt, this is all going to be over, this is going to be stopped." It was a natural moment to be frozen and Kairo admits she felt unable to do much at all for at least a week.

Then, she got going again.

"I needed to paint, immediately, something that would sell." But while "sometimes bad feelings make good art," all the ideas Kairo had in those early days, "just started dripping in blood." They weren't even "bad in a good way," she says. Eventually though, a plan began to come together. "Usually my still lifes sell nicely, so, (I thought), okay, I'll just do flower paintings."

Now she'd stumbled into "painting something that felt right and wasn't ugly or bad or boring, I started moving and donating and feeling powerful," not frozen anymore. Kairo soon launched what she called her "special naivist operation," selling paintings, drawings and prints, as well as uniquely designed teapots and even a rocking horse – all to raise funds for Ukraine.

Prints of her take on Paul Kondas' "The Strawberry Eaters" were quickly snapped up by ex-presidents, famous Estonian academics and plenty of others besides. "A lot of people were in a lot of pain – and I'm talking bystander pain here. I guess for me, art became a way to ease the pain and guilt by just channeling money," she says. "I'm just hoping some of that money went to help another real person to actually survive somewhere, because I donated it to a lot of different organizations."

Kairo is keen to stress that raising funds for Ukraine was a group effort. She describes her artworks as becoming like "magical objects," at that point, with the power to encourage people, who already wanted to help to actually go ahead and donate. "So, I just used art as a magical object to pull this money in and help it to go forward. So, it's not just about the art – the willingness [to give] was there anyway."

Two years have now gone by since Kairo bought that bouquet of tulips. "A lot of flowers have wilted in the meantime, and this is not over yet," she says. "But I did paint this very dark and threatening sky with these tulips hanging in the air and the tablecloth with the Estonian national bird on it." The painting Kairo created to capture that mood is called "Flowers for Independence Day."

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"When you arrive at the end of a successful painting, it's a very pleasurable place to be," Kairo says. "Even if it's not a pleasurable thing to look at. Maybe it's a sad painting with clouds of smoke coming out of your eyes and tears everywhere and you feel like you don't have any agency."

"But if you manage to communicate that, you sort of get the power back into your own hands – and you have a voice, you communicated, you made an object. All these things can take the edge off these horrible times. Yeah, this is how I'm surviving," she says. "I forgot what your question was."

***

It's become clear from our conversation, that whatever the original idea behind the "arts of survival" concept may have been when it was first dreamed up, it has taken on plenty of new meanings since then. And in such confusing times as these, no doubt it will continue to evolve in several new directions as the capital of culture year goes on.

But as the spotlight turns to shine on Kairo's hometown by the banks of the Emajõgi River, and the wider region of which it's a proud part, I wonder what hopes and dreams she still has for the year ahead – for Tartu 2024.

Kairo smiles. "It's exciting and we shouldn't grow too accustomed to it. Soon the focus is going to be elsewhere, so we should make the most of it because this is going to leave a trail – a digital trail, a paper trail and a painting trail too, I hope."

"I am also hoping that in the midst of all of this merry-making and celebration, some critical minds are going to give us some harsher feedback, and maybe some new connections will be formed that lead to something more substantial," she says. And, no doubt, there will be plenty of time to consider the long-term legacy of all this later. But for now, maybe there's something to be said for just enjoying this brief cultural moment, no matter how naive some may think that sounds.

"It's going be a wild ride, and when it's over we're going to have some nice memories," Kairo says. "But, you know we're still in it. And this is what I have to remind myself – make good memories."

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This year's Stencibility Street Art Festival takes place in Tartu from July 4-7 as part of the Tartu 2024 main program.

The Stencibility exhibition "Hello, Mister Police Officer?" opens at a "shady, shady place" in Tallinn on May 10.

Kairo's solo exhibition, celebrating 15 years of being totally naive, opens at Tartu's Haki Gallery in August.

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