The tour is constructed around three themes: how Garage Archive Collection appeared; how to reveal history that is hidden in documents; and the relationship between artistic practice and the socio-political context in which it exists.
These three important questions will be discussed through looking at materials from various archives connected to the Leningrad/St. Petersburg art scene from the 1950s to the 2020s. The collection includes numerous photographs, samizdat anthologies, personal attestations, posters, booklets, short notes, and plump treatises. Each piece of evidence can be read in different ways, for example as an artifact created with a specific aim, as a source of information about the biography of a particular person or as a document that discusses a period of local history. On the tour you will learn about various ways of interpreting archives created by artists, writers, curators, and other people from the St. Petersburg cultural scene, and also which famous exhibitions of Leningrad unofficial art you can find about through photographs. You will empathize with a complaint from the artists of the Arefiev Circle, guess which techniques Evgeny Mikhnov-Voitenko or Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe used to create their image, and consider which strategies of Soviet underground culture are repeated today in a new form and which would be better left in the past.