"Remove the stuffed fox. To the 100th anniversary of local history"

In December 1921, a conference of scientific societies for the study of the local region was held in Moscow, which consolidated the word "local history" in the museum and administrative lexicon. For the 100th anniversary of local history, the Museum of Moscow has prepared an exhibition project on the history of the formation of Soviet local history museums. The exhibition space will turn into an imaginary museum of local lore in Moscow, designed by curators according to Soviet instructions from the 1930s. The departments and sections of this museum visualize the main methods of building local history expositions, and numerous texts and quotes in the exposition reveal the ideological and socio-political implications inherent in them.

The exhibition at the Museum of Moscow is a deconstruction exhibition designed to dispel the nostalgic flair around the Museum of Local Lore. At the exhibition, the local history exposition canon - largely lost its relevance, in some places undeservedly forgotten, but often reproduced in updated materials as if there are no alternatives for it - is dissected, taken apart and analyzed from the point of view of its original tasks.

Millions of residents of the post-Soviet space are familiar with the classic exposition of the local history museum. Stuffed animals, tundra, revolution - any local history and nature can be placed in such stereotyped frames. The curators of the project urge not only to see the trends that originate in the museum’s exposition policy of the 1930s, but also to think about how else we can put together the “golden triad” of local history - a representation of modern society, nature and history.

“We demand from the Soviet local history museum an active participation in the study of the productive forces of the region, its natural resources, life, population, and its history. We demand from our museums a Marxist-Leninist exposition. " Nathan Schneerson, one of the leaders of the museum and local history movement of the 1930s, ideologist and head of the Istra Museum (today - "New Jerusalem"), 1934.

“The Istra Museum has found an accordion. Why, it seemed, the accordion to the museum? A small detail - it was found at a factory worker and at one time it was used to disguise illegal meetings. The same museum found a signal lamp among the population, which was placed on the window of the safe apartment. " Felix Cohn, ethnographer, 1936.

“We can confidently say that just the croaking of a frog or a beetle flying out of the aquarium can devalue the entire exhibit in the hall, riveting the attention of the mass audience to these episodes that were not foreseen by viewing programs, and frustrate the overvalue of the idea that summarizes it.” Alexander Kots, scientist, doctor of biological sciences, professor, museologist, founder and first director of the Darwin Museum, 1944.

A curatorial team - researcher Sofya Gavrilova and curator of the Museum of Moscow Alisa Savitskaya - worked on the exhibition. Sofia Gavrilova studied archival and library materials, as well as local museums. In her research, the local history museum is the material embodiment of the local history movement, as well as a historical heritage, on the basis of which one can speak of programming a certain type of relationship between a person and a territory. An important part of working with museums of local lore was visual research - from childhood, familiar biogroups of animals, showcases full of archaeological finds and stands strewn with documents and photographs deserve no less attention than the documents on the basis of which they were created.

The viewers of the exhibition will be able not only to get acquainted with the results of the research, but also to immerse themselves in the atmosphere of a classic museum of local lore. The parts of the departments of nature, history and socialist construction presented at the exhibition include more than 200 exhibits - paintings, graphics, archaeological finds, furniture and household items, postcards and posters from the collection of the Museum of Moscow, as well as 50 stuffed animals from the collection of the State Biological Museum named after K.A. Timiryazev.

Simultaneously with the exhibition in the museum, the 6th International Conference “Museum in the City - City in the Museum” will begin, which this year is also dedicated to the 100th anniversary of local history. The conference annually brings together museum professionals, historians, anthropologists, curators, artists, architects, sociologists, urbanists, art historians and cultural scientists to discuss the role of city and regional museums in the context of historical and modern urban development. The detailed program of the conference is published on the website of the Museum of Moscow.

Curators:

Sofya Gavrilova - candidate of geographical sciences, researcher, artist, author of several chapters from books and articles on local history and local history museums: Regional Memories of the Great Terror: Representation of the Gulag in Russian Kraevedcheskii Museums Russian local history museums ") in the journal Problems of Post-Communism and" The legacy of Soviet theoretical and expositional methods in the local history museum "in the collection" The politics of affect: Museum as a space for public history. " In 2019, Sofya Gavrilova defended her dissertation The present taxidermied: Soviet ’common unsaids’ in Russian krayevedcheskyi museums at Oxford University, which formed the basis for Russia’s Regional museums:Representing and misrepresenting knowledge about Nature, History and Society (“Russian regional museums: Representing and misrepresenting knowledge about nature, history and society”, 2022).

Alisa Savitskaya - chief curator of the Tikhaya studio, Nizhny Novgorod; invited curator of the Museum of Moscow. Author of a number of exhibition projects made at the intersection of contemporary art and "new local history", among which - "Museum of Great Hopes" (2015), "Life of the Living" (2016) and "Gorky. Modernism "(2018) at the Nizhny Novgorod Arsenal. Collaborated with the Center for Contemporary Art "Typography" (Krasnodar), the Museum of Contemporary Art PERMM (Perm), the Ural Industrial Biennale of Contemporary Art (Yekaterinburg). Author of the books "A Brief History of Nizhny Novgorod Street Art" (together with Artyom Filatov, 2019) and "Communal Avant-garde. Directory-guide to the social cities of the Automobile Plant and Uralmash in Nizhny Novgorod and Yekaterinburg "(together with Elena Belova and Alexey Gordin, 2011).

Exhibition architect:

Nikita Goinov is an architect who has been working with museums since 2012. Key projects in the field of museum design: Let’s Go! Exhibitions at the Perm Museum of Local Lore (2016), "Uprooted" (2020) and "IDI" at the PERMM Museum of Contemporary Art (2020). Laureate of the Innovation-2021 Prize.

Project partners:

State Biological Museum. K.A. Timiryazev;
State Historical and Art Museum "New Jerusalem";
Museum of Geosciences, Moscow State University M.V. Lomonosov.