“Keeping the Thread”: On the Archival Practices of Ry Nikonova and Sergei Sigei

The legacy of neo-avant-garde artists Ry Nikonova (1942–2014) and Sergei Sigei (1947–2014) is unusually extensive and reflects the activity of their creative endeavors in a wide variety of genres and art forms over nearly half a century, beginning in the mid-1960s. Self-publishing and performing activity within the informal culture of the USSR in the 1970s and 1980s, Mail art in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and small-print book publishers around the world after Sigei and Nikonova’s emigration in 1998 was paralleled by the creation of the artists’ home archive, which served as both a studio and a repository for their work. Various aspects and examples of Sigei and Nikonova’s archival activities are discussed in this chapter as a development of the main ideas of the “Transfurist Manifesto No. 1” published in 1980 and demonstrate different ways to use the archive as a productive artistic device.