Archiving the Future
12 November 2017

November 17, 8 p.m.The presentation of Boris Yukhananov. From Theatre-Theatre to The Garden, a book covering the period from the mid-1980s to the beginning of the 1990s, when Yukhananov founded Theatre-Theatre, the first class of students entered the Studio of Individual Directing (MIR), and work began on the mystery play The Garden. The book includes a flash-drive with fragments of videos of theatre performances and films that are drawn from Yukhananov’s archive.

We will also present Boris Yukhananov’s personal website, which, in fact, will be a large online archive of materials. It will make available thousands of photos, video recordings of lectures, director’s diaries, explications and analyses, a huge collection of critical articles and reviews from the 1980s to the present, transcripts of public conversations, interviews, and, of course, previously unreleased recordings of performances, actions, and video films.

That same evening at 9 p.m. a screening of two Boris Yukhananov films, Theatre-Theatre and The Mansion, will be held. Both films were created during the times of the Worldwide Theatre-Theatre Video in the late 1980s.  

November 18, 8 p.m. Klim Kozinsky shows Sphere, his film about Boris Yukhananov’s new-processual project The Garden (based on materials from A Mystery in Kratovo).

November 19, 6 p.m. Continue your journey through The Garden with this screening of a video film of the fifth regeneration of The Garden in The Garden-5 (1995).

Archiving the Future is a major project by Boris Yukhananov that, for the first time, will make available to the public unique materials covering more than three decades of the director’s work. Among the most important goals of the project is the documentation and preservation of testimonies about the artistic adventures of Theatre-Theatre, Yukhananov’s work with actors in the parallel cinema, the long journey of The Garden project, attempts to read the Torah with the help of theatrical games in LaboraTORiAH, experiments of different generations of the Studio of Individual Directing (MIR) - right up to recent work on The Golden Ass. But there are other goals as well. The archiving process is particularly important in the case of evolutionary, multi-year projects, because it is often possible to understand them fully only after the passage of time when you are able to compare different stages of the project. As Yukhananov himself says, "It is only possible to distinguish new processualism in the archive mode.”

Today the Archiving the Future project enters an active phase. It will regularly reappear in various initiatives, including public meetings, discussions and productions. Of course, the archive itself will constantly be updated with new materials.