EXHIBITIONS AND DISPLAYS

FOOTNOTES FROM AN UNLOCATED MUSEUM

BY THE PROVISIONAL ARCHIVIST

December 4, 2025

Somewhere beyond the authority of maps, in that uncertain stretch of eastern Russia where directions thin into weather, stands a museum devoted to what never came to be. Its main catalog has vanished—no one remembers when—and only the following footnotes survive, like labels for rooms the building forgot to include.

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¹ The Museum is referenced once, obliquely, in the 1911 edition of Энциклопедия Забвения (Encyclopedia of Oblivion), entry missing due to water damage.

² No coordinates provided — only “east, but not too east.”

³ A copyist later added (in pencil): "whenever east becomes uncertain."

⁴ Kuznetsov’s diary (1923) offers the earliest known description — torn, smudged, and suspiciously poetic.

⁵ The word далеко (“far away”) appears six times in one paragraph, then never again.

⁶ Founding curator identified only as E.B.; no personnel records match.

⁷ Earliest catalogue pages show entries labeled нет (“does not exist”) in increasingly ornate script.

⁸ Archivists suggest the handwriting changed over time — or over weather.

⁹ A corridor reportedly dedicated to bridges designed in dreams. No blueprint survives.

¹⁰ Cf. Petrov, Cartographies of Doubt, Krasnoyarsk Press, 1978.

¹¹ Tickets once stamped ничего (“nothing”). Ink evaporated mid-touch.

¹² Visitors claim they left — but cannot prove arrival.

¹³ West wing: portraits of the unrecorded, their gaze persistent.

¹⁴ “Clock Room” allegedly contains hours not yet lived.

¹⁵ Timekeeping unreliable. See Appendix D (missing).

¹⁶ Leap year admission only — source debated, logic unclear.

¹⁷ Memory Soup (воспоминание суп) served daily; taste nostalgic, undocumented.

¹⁸ Two student researchers vanished on site (1997). No official file.

¹⁹ Some argue the main exhibition text disappeared; others argue it never existed.

²⁰ Cross-reference notes 7 and 94 for circular dispute.

²¹ Audio tape labeled “Opening Ceremony” records only wind and applause.

²² A fresco titled The Great Unmade is mentioned thrice, never seen.

²³ Gift shop postcards depict the museum absent — sold out since 1974.

²⁴ Archive list: Future Unchosen (dust & possibility). No box number.

²⁵ Report on the Impossible (Отчёт по Невозможному) rejected — “lack of physical evidence.”

²⁶ Key collection displays doors demolished decades prior.

²⁷ Ink blots suggest footnotes once referenced a body text — now lost.

²⁸ Researchers speak of faint typing in empty halls.

²⁹ Clanking heard near Basement 3, though no Basement 3 exists.

³⁰ Room 12 appears only in citations, never in floor plans.

³¹ Cf. footnote 55 regarding structural hallucination.

³² Mechanical diagram labeled Maybe Machine — purpose indeterminate.

³³ Steel plate reads: Activated only by regret.

³⁴ Blueprints reverse themselves after midnight (oral testimony, unverified).

³⁵ Winter report claims museum expands during snowfall, contracts in thaw.

³⁶ Comparative studies align its behavior with migratory birds (Zaitsev, 1989).

³⁷ Visitor log: 241 names, all invisible ink.

³⁸ Indentations imply strong handwriting, weak certainty.

³⁹ Illegible

⁴⁰ Demonstrations postponed indefinitely.

⁴¹ Catalogue fragment defines “Exhibit” as “proof of possibility.”

⁴² Other fragment defines “Exhibit” as “the absence in which proof might occur.”

⁴³ Cross-reference suggests footnotes contradict intentionally.

⁴⁴ Funding allocated annually — to what remains unclear.

⁴⁵ State inspector reported “nothing to report.” Filed as complete.

⁴⁶ Ceiling crack resembles a map of rivers that never formed.

⁴⁷ Conservator tried to repair it — crack widened.

⁴⁸ Museum staff includes 14 employees; payroll lists 9; directory lists 3.

⁴⁹ Salaries disbursed for decades to missing personnel numbers.

⁵⁰ Keycard discovered for “Curator of Hypotheticals.” No office found.

⁵¹ Smell of old paper reported by those who have never been inside.

⁵² Visitor brochure translated poorly into Finnish, impeccably into Silence.

⁵³ Misprint reads Museum of Things That Might Wish They Didn’t Exist.

⁵⁴ Curiously accurate.

⁵⁵ Several architectural drawings labeled hallucinated only under archival conditions.

⁵⁶ Winter light (rare) reveals outlines of unbuilt rooms.

⁵⁷ Missing. Archive ledger notes only: “Page present but contents absent.”

⁵⁸ Scholars debate whether light or room is responsible.

⁵⁹ Series of glass jars contain “the idea of rain.”

⁶⁰ Condensation never forms.

⁶¹ Handwritten label: do not open — storm risk.

⁶² Item missing from inventory check, weather unchanged.

⁶³ East Annex holds “incomplete futures,” though entrance unverified.

⁶⁴ A torn map points toward a forest where the museum might migrate in spring.

⁶⁵ Migration theory dismissed — then reconsidered, then worshipped briefly.

⁶⁶ Sculpture garden rumored to feature statues of possibilities unmolded.

⁶⁷ Footprints in snow lead inward, never outward.

⁶⁸ Possible explanation: visitors do not leave but become uncounted.

⁶⁹ Cf. folkloric record of Не-ушедшие — “the ones who did not go.”

⁷⁰ Archive index card marked only with a circle.

⁷¹ Circle believed to indicate “nothing missing” or “everything missing.”

⁷² A letter dated 1962 apologizes for losing the master plan; envelope empty.

⁷³ Glass slide labeled Exhibit: Absence (early edition).

⁷⁴ No image on film, only dust.

⁷⁵ Dust catalogued separately as Possible Evidence.

⁷⁶ A guard recalls museum walls breathing during certain storms.

⁷⁷ Researcher notes heartbeat rhythm in ventilation ducts.

⁷⁸ Technician attributes sound to pipes — pipes deny involvement.

⁷⁹ Art Handling Guidelines: Lift gently; do not look directly at nothing.

⁸⁰ Several crates shipped internationally containing empty space.

⁸¹ Customs declared them infinite; paperwork ongoing.

⁸² A letter from Berlin requests loan of The Idea of a Lost Country.

⁸³ Reply sent, content unknown — envelope pulsed faintly.

⁸⁴ Gift shop also sells silence (limited stock).

⁸⁵ Visitors describe purchase as “memorable, but hard to carry.”

⁸⁶ Curator’s desk drawer contains tickets to exhibitions never opened.

⁸⁷ One is dated 2035.

⁸⁸ Suggests temporal admission policy forthcoming.

⁸⁹ Fire drill procedures printed in invisible ink.

⁹⁰ Alarms tested — silence very loud.

⁹¹ Emergency exits lead deeper into the museum.

⁹² Local folklore: “Building devours only what it remembers.”

⁹³ Therefore visitors are encouraged to forget themselves.

⁹⁴ Paradox outlined in Seminar Notes, vol. XII (vanished).

⁹⁵ Funds requested for restoration of “intangible exhibits.”

⁹⁶ Approved unanimously.

⁹⁷ No visible progress.

⁹⁸ Final annual report summary: Existence probable but unstable.

⁹⁹ Recommendation: continued study under controlled doubt.

¹⁰⁰ Last surviving annotation in the archive margin reads:

If the museum persists, we must ask why.

If it disappears, we must ask the same.

¹⁰¹ A microfiche labeled Supplementary Notes discovered in 2008; image only static but deemed “meaning-rich.”

¹⁰² Planned expedition received enthusiasm, then collective amnesia; no applications filed.

¹⁰³ Marginalia in an unsigned hand: The museum exists only when footnoted. Continue.

The Provisional Archivist has never been identified, and some dispute that he or she ever existed at all. Their file contains only a date without a year and a signature that loops back into itself. It is said that they wrote the footnotes from a desk no one remembers placing in the archive. Whether they vanished or were never present remains an open question.

COMMENTARY ON THE FOOTNOTES

by Dr. Marina V. Sokolova

Department of Impossible Museology, Lomonosov Moscow State University

Draft for Unknown Circulation Only

The medals are verified; Dr. Marina V. Sokolova is not.

The 103 surviving footnotes concerning the so-called Museum of Things That Do Not Exist constitute the most substantial body of evidence we possess for this institution, though they resist conventional interpretation by virtue of their fragmentary status and recursive logic. The absence of any primary text—indeed, the implication in notes 19, 27, and 94 is that such a thing may never have existed—places the scholar in a position both enviable and precarious. There is nothing to interpret except interpretation itself. The archive presents us with a museum defined not by walls or objects, but by linguistic residue, by the margins of a text that evaporated (or was never written) before academic inquiry could properly begin.

A pattern of administrative contradiction emerges early. Footnotes 6, 18, and 48–50 reference staff whose records do not align, while 44–45 indicate regular state funding despite a lack of verifiable activity. This suggests an institution maintained not through material function but through bureaucratic momentum—a museum preserved, paradoxically, by forgetting what it is meant to preserve.

The “missing” introduces purposeful discontinuity. Its placement implies that absence is not merely incidental but structural, perhaps even foundational to the museum’s identity. If the museum exists only when footnoted, as asserted in 103, then these gaps serve not as flaws but as proof of life: lacunae as heartbeat.

Artifacts described throughout the text oscillate between conceptual and meteorological. References to “memory soup” (17), “the idea of rain” (59), and clocks keeping future hours (14) suggest exhibitions organized around not material culture but temporal conditions, emotional weather, and unrealized infrastructure. The museum’s holdings lean toward the unachieved and the hypothetical, aligning with what Alexander Pushkin termed “the possible-as-ghost,” though Pushkin himself is never cited and the phrase is likely apocryphal.

Perhaps most intriguing is the museum’s relationship with migration and instability. Notes 35, 56–58, and 64–66 imply seasonal expansion and contraction, even geographical drift, positioning the institution closer to a phenomenological organism than architecture. This aligns with speculative folkloric accounts of Не-ушедшие (69): those who do not leave, yet are no longer present. One may reasonably conjecture that the museum, too, occupies this threshold—extant only in the tense between was and might have been.

In conclusion, these footnotes do not document the Museum of Things That Do Not Exist so much as enact it. They constitute a museum whose materiality is scholarship itself, an archive in which documentation replaces object, margin replaces room, and absence becomes the primary exhibit. To study this museum is to build it; to footnote it is to open its doors.

The only question that remains—and the archive leaves us here, exquisitely suspended—is whether continued research preserves the museum or erases it further. If the institution survives only through annotation, then our work is not analysis but architecture.

The next sentence we write may be the next room.

Dr. Marina V. Sokolova (b. 1939, Perm Oblast) claims she entered archival work by accident—though no record confirms or denies it. She studied at the University of Stalingrad, where her dissertation on invisible collections reportedly vanished during review. Known for her research into museums with no verifiable contents, she has been praised for “making absence almost legible.” She currently lives between Moscow and the archive room she insists does not exist.

Cover image: Photograph recovered near the archive; provenance uncertain, relevance unlikely.