The private collection emerged spontaneously as an effect of music, artistic, and political undertakings of Krzysztof Skiba, who through the 1980s was an animator of alternative culture and activist of the anarchist movement in Gdańsk and Łódź. In 1983 he co-founded the Alternative Society Movement famed as the first post-war anarchist organization in Poland. The same year he moved from Gdańsk to Łódź, where he started studies at Łódź University and quickly joined the team of the student theatre Pstrąg. Then he became an animator in student club Balbina in Łódź, where from 1987 he organized exhibitions, concerts, happenings and other events, many of them presenting radical neo-avant-garde such as Łódź Kaliska group or underground artists, e.g. Totart and Praffdata collectives. Meanwhile, Skiba joined the publicly acting, anti-militarist Freedom and Peace movement, because after he had been arrested and subsequently imprisoned in 1985 he was no longer anonymous and so had to cease underground anarchist activism. In 1988 Skiba formed a punk cabaret Big Cyc (Big Tit) as a way of legally spreading the anti-government propaganda from the scene. The same year he established the happening art group called the Gallery of Maniacal Activities, inspired by the Orange Alternative movement in Wrocław.
During the decade Skiba connected three different groups: radical activists representing the anarchistic-ecological orientation, underground bohemians (artists, poets, performers, and musicians), and students of high schools and university in Łódź. He exchanged letters with dozens activists and adherents, took part in mail art network and so-called third circuit; distributed anarchist and dissident papers. This way, without a particular interest in creating the collection, he managed to gather a big private archive of underground activities from the last years of Polish People’s Republic. After the transition Skiba made a career in show-business and lost many of his former underground connections. He even donated parts of his archive to the European Solidarity Centre and the KARTA Centre Foundation. However, his private collection still contains about one thousand objects, many of them digitalized.
The Alternative Society Movement, the anarchist organization co-founded by Krzysztof Skiba in Gdańsk in 1983, was a strongly anti-government group. They criticized militarist, authoritarian, oppressive regime of Polish People’s Republic, and called the public to create a democratic society of free individuals, united in voluntary cooperatives, local organizations, grassroots communities, and labor unions. In their argumentation members of the group followed the classics of anarchist thought, such as Bakunin, Kropotkin, Stirner, Abramowski, and Wróblewski. They also acclaimed the program of the ‘Solidarity’ union from 1981. However, due to a conservative, clerical, and cautious attitude of the ‘Solidarity’ leaders, young anarchists became skeptical toward the union and decided to take measures independently and autonomously.
Having no social endorsement nor base in ‘Solidarity’, anarchists chose to take political advantages from the alternative culture rising popularity among youngsters. Exemplification of this turn were the Hyde Parks, as they called annual events organized in small villages in the countryside, where they invited punk bands, underground artists, poets, and alternative theatres, with the intention to mix cultural activities with the talks about anarchism. They perceived the alternative culture as a safety vent, accepted by the regime to keep the youth under government control and far from the politics. Nonetheless, they tried to saturate the forms of alternative culture with dissent ideas and use it as a mean of activating the youth generation. This concept was implemented in street happenings of Gallery of Maniacal Activities or through mockery in zines such as ‘Przegięcie Pały’, well documented in Krzysztof Skiba's archive.
Source:
Krzysztof Skiba, ‘Komisariat naszym domem. Pomarańczowa historia’, Warsaw: Narodowe Centrum Kultury, 2015.
