COURAGE

savienojot kolekcijas

The most significant event in the history of the present collection was the donation of the major part of Mihnea Berindei’s personal archive to the Iași County Branch of the Romanian National Archives (Serviciul Județean al Arhivelor Naționale Iași, SJAN). This event occurred in two stages. First, the founder agreed to donate a smaller portion of his archive to the institution in March 2013, when he retired from his research position and relocated to Venice. SJAN seemed the most appropriate option due to the existence of adequate storage space and specialised trained personnel and the future accessibility of these papers to the wider public. The transportation of these materials to Iași was possible due to the direct involvement of Dorin Dobrincu and to the support of the head of the Iași Branch of the National Archives, Florin Cîntic. An agreement was concluded between SJAN and the Berindei, according to which the archive was to be inventoried, catalogued, and separated into a special archival unit – the Mihnea Berindei Collection. Second, the larger remaining part of the archive was donated by the founder to the SJAN in 2016, shortly before his death, under the same conditions. Dorin Dobrincu’s role was crucial in this phase, as he personally oversaw the transportation of twenty-two large boxes comprising Berindei’s papers to Iași. In this ad-hoc collection, only the documents relating to the history of communist Romania have been selected. The materials stored in Iași are currently in the process of being inventoried and catalogued. At the time of writing, the collection has not yet been thoroughly described and archived.

The on-line publication of the collection of the Polish Performance Archive, created using the items from Filmoteka and Artists’ Archives of the MoMA in Warsaw was marked by a 1.5-month-long series of meetings with Polish performance artists and lectures titled “On the Tip of the Tongue: Performance and the War of Words”. The meetings accentuated the participation of female artists, who contributed strongly to the development of this genre.

The staging of materials from Queer Archives Institute in Sao Paulo was part of the exhibition "Acervo Videobrasil em Contexto #2". Visual materials chosen by Karol Radziszewski to be exposed in Brazil aimed at showing the forgotten and unknown history of Central-Eastern European queer community. Too often region of Central and Eastern Europe was perceived as peripheral in modern queer history and theory. Radziszewski's activities had the purpose of showing ambiguity and struggle of LGBTQ communities in (post)-socialist states.