“Keeping the Thread”: On the Archival Practices of Ry Nikonova and Sergei Sigei

Kukuj, Ilja (2024): “Keeping the Thread”: On the Archival Practices of Ry Nikonova and Sergei Sigei. In: Smola, Klavdia; Kukulin, Ilya und Bachmaier, Annelie (eds.) : (Counter-)Archive: Memorial Practices of the Soviet Underground. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 101-139

Abstract

The legacy of neo-avant-garde artists Ry Nikonova (1942–2014) and Sergei Sigei (1947–2014) is unusually extensive and reflects the activity of their creative endeavors in a wide variety of genres and art forms over nearly half a century, beginning in the mid-1960s. Self-publishing and performing activity within the informal culture of the USSR in the 1970s and 1980s, Mail art in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and small-print book publishers around the world after Sigei and Nikonova’s emigration in 1998 was paralleled by the creation of the artists’ home archive, which served as both a studio and a repository for their work. Various aspects and examples of Sigei and Nikonova’s archival activities are discussed in this chapter as a development of the main ideas of the “Transfurist Manifesto No. 1” published in 1980 and demonstrate different ways to use the archive as a productive artistic device.

• Item Type: Book Section
• Keywords: Ry Nikonova; Sergei Sigei; Transfurism; “Transponans”; Visual poetry; Mail art
• Faculties: Languages and Literatures > Department 2 > Slavic Philology
• Subjects: 700 Arts and recreation > 700 Arts; 800 Literature > 890 Other literatures
• ISBN: 978-3-031-67133-3
• Place of Publication: Cham
• Language: English