COURAGE

łączymy kolekcje

The Nelu Stratone collection is one of the most impressive collections of rock, jazz, and folk records created in communist Romania, as a result of the happy combination between its owner’s exceptional passion for alternative music and his ability to acquire records that were not imported officially. The collection is important not only for its size, but even more for the significant number of albums of Western provenance, which were unavailable in shops in Romania but could nevertheless be obtained due to the existence of an alternative market for such products. The creation and preservation of such a collection were activities regarded with suspicion by the communist authorities in Romania, because they proved the younger generation’s fascination with Western cultural products, in contravention of the spirit of Nicolae Ceauşescu’s Theses of July 1971.

This ad-hoc collection is related to the activities of the first explicitly anti-communist organisation of the post-Stalinist period that operated in the Moldavian SSR, the Democratic Union of Socialists. The materials within this collection focus on the activity of the founder and main ideologue of the group, Nicolae Dragoș, a schoolteacher who challenged the political and ideological monopoly of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union under the impact of Khrushchev’s “thaw” and aimed at creating an alternative political movement based on a platform of “democratic socialism.” The Dragoș case files, originally held in the Archive of the Intelligence and Security Service of the Republic of Moldova (formerly the KGB Archive), were transferred to the National Archive of the Republic of Moldova in 2012.  

The collection documents the work of Croatian historian and political émigré Nikola Čolak (1914-1996). In 1966, he belonged to a group of academics and thinkers from Zadar, who officially sought to break the Communist Party's monopoly on truth by establishing the first journal not controlled by the Party. After the suppression of this initiative, Čolak was forced into exile in Italy. The so-called Movement of Independent Intellectuals represented the first attempt to create a formal cultural opposition circle not only in Croatia, but in Yugoslavia as a whole, which is recorded through this collection.

The film and television work of the unconventional screenplay writer and director Nikša Fulgosi (1919-1996) is a component of the cultural heritage, which in a peculiar way testifies to the culture of dissent in the period of socialism in Croatia and Yugoslavia. Many of Fulgosi's film works remained unfinished or were "put in the vault" after their completion because the censors considered them unfit for the public. Fulgosi made the first television documentary series about sex for the Zagreb Radio Television in the late 1970s, which was only partially aired.

The No Art Collection is a part of the Anti-Museum founded by Vladimir Dodig Trokut. It consists of characteristic avant-garde and post-avant-garde artefacts. The Anti-Museum’s No Art Collection was established during the many years of Trokut’s activity as a member of the informal cultural opposition, which was supported by prominent individuals and public personalities, such as artists and politicians like Koča Popović and Jure Kaštelan.