Sasha Obukhova relays the story of the personal archive that emerged in 1987 as a collection of private memories and transformed into Garage Archive Collection.
As time went by, it accumulated more documents—more fragments of instant history—whose status was ambiguous from the start: they were entries in an intimate diary, but also a source of information which tried to be objective. Other private archives attached themselves to this archive, and so private and collective memories merged into a single narrative on the history of Russian art of the second half of the twentieth century. In 2012, the archive found its home at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, and the scale of the joint effort to preserve memory has become so huge that one can no longer see what was personal in the general flow. However, the archive’s main task has remained unchanged—to facilitate total recall.