Museum of Stones

The Museum of Stones was created as a reflection and speculative extension of the self-publishing practices that appeared during the protests in Belarus and continue today. As a hybrid infrastructure, such publications, also known as neighborhood newspapers, are created through grassroots initiatives and distributed via digital platforms and streets. Everybody can download the issues from Telegram channels, print them out at home and put them in mailboxes, cafés or other public places. Protest neighborhood newspapers create common solidarity structures that disseminate essential political information, in light of the majority of independent media in Belarus having been closed down and deemed “extremist.” By utilizing political imagination, The Museum of Stones provides opportunities for more voices to be heard, creating alternative or additional ramifications in the existing infrastructure of neighborhood newspapers. The newspaper issues are devoted to the possibilities of organizing care infrastructures in a particular neighborhood, with the practices of the “cybernetics of the poor” serving as an antithesis to “high technology” through multiple interviews with anarchists, representatives of the LGBTQ+ community and militants, among others. The name “Museum of Stones” is borrowed from a museum of the same name in Minsk, where stones from all over the country have been collected. It is symbolic that today the open-air museum exposes the ruins of infrastructure.