This visual essay is part of a collection of archival and contemporary material relating to the work of the Tallinn Experimental Plant Estoplast. Its contents – technical drawings, promotional materials, newspaper images, photos from online classified ads, sketches, models, and renderings – are collected, continued, remade and reimagined as part of an ongoing project that archives the work of Estoplast while also mapping Estonian design history. The project’s previous outcomes include publications (including Nobody Expected There Would Be Much Discussion About It (Lugemik / Estonian Museum of Applied Art and Design) published in 2015), typeface design, digital models, and collage-based installations.

The Tallinn Experimental Plant Estoplast was founded in 1959 from an amalgamation of different private firms that had themselves been founded before or during the first Republic of Estonia (1918–1940). Under the Soviet occupation and the establishment of the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic (1940–1991) – a period that also included the Nazi German occupation during the Second World War (1941–1944) – the private sector disappeared entirely and rapid industrialisation took place. The founding of Estoplast also marked the beginning of large-scale industrial production and industrial lighting design in Estonia. Estoplast produced the following categories of light fixtures: suspended lamps, wall lamps, table lamps, floor lamps, ceiling lamps, special purpose lamps and light switches.

In 1979, the factory was renamed Tallinn Experimental Plant Estoplast – ‘experimental’ designating it as what would now be called a ‘pilot plant’ – a pre-commercial production site employing new technologies and producing small volumes of new products for the purpose of learning and experimentation. This mandate gave the artists opportunities to travel outside the Soviet Union and consult foreign magazines at the library, introducing them to aesthetic developments from beyond the Iron Curtain. Experimentation and educating yourself through western magazines became ways of escaping the rigid Soviet design system, whose primary goal was to assist in building a perfect communist society.

This project relates closely to my grandmother Kirsti Metusala (1937–2025), who was employed as an artist at Estoplast between 1965 and 1992. She often worked with other artists (today, ‘designers’) during the sketching phase, after which ‘constructors’ (today, ‘product engineers’) produced rationalised designs geared towards mass production. Alongside its standard production, Estoplast regularly took on custom orders, designing and producing lamps to specification for particular clients and spaces – the commission for the offices of the Kremlin being one such order. The Art Council (Moscow) invited Estoplast to enter a competition to design lamps for the minister’s offices. Kirsti and Laine Linnas, a fellow artist at Estoplast, were assigned the task of sketching and designing the entry, and their sketches won. It was later suspected, however, that there had been no other entries and that Estoplast had been the only one invited to participate.

This specific series brings together a collage timeline based on Kirsti Metusala’s lamp sketches, depicting the design process for lamps intended for the offices of the Kremlin between 1981 and 1986. The sketches were found tucked into the storage compartment of my grandparents modular couch – forgotten, until they resurfaced. Each sketch carries handwritten dates and series of notes, which made it possible to piece together a specific timeline and to begin a search – through the archives of the Estonian National Library, through the Communist Party of Estonia’s newspaper Rahva Hääl (The People’s Voice), through Russian websites documenting Soviet-era official interiors, eventually locating a colour photograph of what appears to be the finished lamp in the office of the Prime Minister of the Russian Federation.

What the sketches reveal is the distance between design for power and design for the people – the marble, jade, and gilded details of the Kremlin commission set against the standardised plastic of Estoplast’s mass production. The commission was received with ambivalence: obligatory work, yet work that came with a reward – in this case, a licence to purchase a new car. These are the kinds of stories that risk being lost under the weight of the occupation. By collaging, remodelling, and reimagining this material, I am not only preserving it – I am learning from it, and reflecting on what it means to work as a designer when the conditions around you leave little room for anything but quiet resistance.