Authorial Comment
In the summer of 2016, we returned from Budapest to Moscow and sold our guitars. In Budapest we had invented Samotryas so that we would not have to carry unnecessary weight: a Samotryas could be assembled from available materials directly at the concert venue. With the money from selling the guitars, we bought a refrigerator and organized a performative expedition to the south.
We lived directly outdoors, had no belongings, and travelled by hitchhiking. So that local residents would not be hostile towards us, but would receive us warmly and hospitably, and so that they would have no questions about who we were, we introduced ourselves as employees of the Archaeological Commission.
Out of this grew a mythological project in which we entered insignificant, unspectacular artifacts of the landscape into the Archaeological Commission Register. These six works are elements of that register.
History
The project is already formulated in the 2016 Krym Book. One spread defines the Archaeological Commission as a commission “for the study of the object world of contemporaneity from the point of view of museum-scientific interest.” Other pages connect it with an urban drift/project, a route of movement, collecting or researching found/washed-out things, and a later plan associated with Pyatikhatki.
A contemporaneous Facebook post of 24 July 2016 states:
As part of the Archaeological Commission, we are compiling a Register of Cultural Monuments for archaeologists of the future.
The post is attached to two photographs and the location/caption Inzhir / Cape Aya.
A second contemporaneous post, dated 15 August 2016, states:
Our archaeological committee has reached today to Rostov-on-Don (four cars from Anapa in one day). Where Russia celebrates Archaeology Day. Dear friends, Congratulations! On the way to Moscow.
By January 2018, the artists’ Index of artist's possessions records that an A3 folder contained a “one-page description of the archaeological commission's work.” The existence of that sheet is documented, but its text has not yet been recovered and is not reconstructed here.
Related Works
Samotryas at ZDES on Taganka
