COURAGE

connecting collections

Petru Negură’s private collection includes a wide variety of materials (interviews and archival documents) related to the activities of the Moldavian Writers’ Union (MWU) from the early Soviet period to the late 1950s and early 1960s. The collection focuses on institutional history and on the relationship of Moldovan writers with state power.

Photographic collection of European Solidarity Centre documents the most important political events from the 1970s and 1980s in Northern Poland. They are a testimonial of suppression, fight and victory, but they also tell little histories: of alternative lifestyles and artistic sensibility. The still-growing archive resources contain over 63.000 items.

The private collection created and owned by Piotr ‘Pietia’ Wierzbicki contains hardcore punk fanzines, articles, and papers from the 1980s, including the original matrices of ‘QQRYQ’ fanzine edited and published by Wierzbicki from 1985. ‘QQRYQ’ was the leading Polish magazine about the underground punk scene and Wierzbicki became an influential author and promoter on that scene.

The Pitch-In Culture was a unique phenomenon of Polish cultural landscape of the 1980s. This informal community brought together radical, critical, and progressive artists from two different generations: the former members of the Zero-61 group and the Film Form Workshop, who had begun their activities back in the 1960s and their younger colleagues, who were breaking up with conceptualism and the ethos of the avant-garde. The nihilistic, anarchistic, neo-Dada circle of the Pitch-In Culture distanced itself both from the state-supported art and from the so-called “church” art created by artists related to the political opposition. The Pitch-In Culture Collection presents artists, their works, manifestos and texts, as well as the documentation of exhibitions and artistic performances.