Tour participants will explore Garage Archive Collection in St. Petersburg and learn about key events and personalities of the local art scene, from the postwar cultural underground to the creation of contemporary art institutions in the 1990s, and also projects from recent decades.
The two tour itineraries devised by archive staff offer different approaches to interacting with the collection. The first itinerary is constructed around learning various ways of interpreting artistic archives and considering the relationship between artistic practice and the socio-political context in which it exists. The second focuses on specific events and people and gives an idea of the synergic nature of St. Petersburg culture, which brings together those working in visual art, literature, and music.
Today there are seventeen archives in St. Petersburg, which include photographs, manuscripts and typescripts, objects and personal items, handmade posters and invitations, and artist’s books and small-edition publications ranging from Soviet samizdat to zines by contemporary artists and graffiti writers. These personal archives were compiled by people in involved in the cultural life of St. Petersburg: artists, writers, curators, researchers, including Andrei Khlobystin, Irina Aktuganova, the family of Ivan Sotnikov, Lyubov Gurevich, Boris Kudryakov, the group New Composers, and others.
Archive staff Anastasia Kotyleva and Ekaterina Mikhatova will describe the archives and the typology of archive documents, discuss the myths and real events that are revealed by artifacts connected with the Arefiev Circle, apartment exhibitions and permitted shows of unofficial art, the New Artists and their practices of recomposition, and the experimental institutions of the 1990s. They will pay particular attention to rare publications—artist’s books, samizdat, zines, and small edition publications—that can be used by authors as a platform for a manifesto, as a means of self-archiving or as a tool for spreading ideas or forming a community.