“A museum is something that has not yet happened”. Based on this formula, a museum can be created anywhere. Through interactions as well as the circulation of artefacts, it can provide impulses for temporary, site-specific exhibitions. As a portable and mobile system, the museum can be transported in a bag, placed on a dining table or exhibited in a museum hall.
“Museum.Delivery” is a performative action that questions the sense and need for museality. Depending on the place, time and participants, the architecture of relations reveals the potential of spatial and social situations to form a temporary museum of the here and now. It can be composed at home, in the office, at school or directly on the street, shown among friends or become a public event or remain in a private setting.
“Museum.Delivery” was launched in 2018 by the micro-artist group “Gorod Ustinov” as part of a residency at the “Gleis70” cooperative in Zurich. In 2022, the name and symbolic function of the practice changed to “Embassy of Microterritories”. The artists Natalia Peredvigina and Kirill Agafonov left militarised Russia. In exile, they presented their works and personal micro-territories, which they carried with them in a diplomatic briefcase. During their 18-month migration through several countries, they offered public discussions and a shared artistic practice, collecting stories and artefacts from the micro-territories of others.
Kirill Agafonov meanwhile lives in Zurich. He is developing the idea of the micro-territory and is working on a continuation of “Museum.Delivery”. In the form of a set of objects and a parcel, it becomes a vehicle of cultural exchange between different countries to which those around him have had to migrate and in which they establish new personal, professional and cultural connections.