From Print Collection to Living Pedagogical Archive: Artistic Formation and Institutional Memory in Skopje

This article examines the Graphic Collection of the Faculty of Fine Arts in Skopje as a material record of artistic formation, institutional memory, and pedagogical heritage. It proposes the concept of the living pedagogical archive not as a replacement for established categories such as teaching collection, university collection, or institutional archive, but as an analytical framework for examining the changing relationships between pedagogical production, institutional preservation, and subsequent reactivation. The framework is articulated through four interconnected processes—preservation, transmission, production, and reinterpretation—and explored through a qualitative case study combining archival research, institutional history, visual analysis, and comparison of seven purposively selected diploma portfolios produced between 1984 and 1997. The analysis identifies contrasting relationships between diploma-period formation and subsequent professional trajectories, including continuity within printmaking, expansion across media, methodological transformation, and professional redirection. It further reconstructs the institutional networks through which different Yugoslav pedagogical traditions became locally embedded in Skopje, while distinguishing such documented genealogies from claims of direct stylistic transmission. The study argues that pedagogical collections can preserve material evidence of artistic formation that remains underrepresented in museum collections and conventional art-historical narratives. In the Skopje case, current cataloguing, digitisation, and research constitute a primarily archival and scholarly activation of this material, demonstrating how educational collections may become newly legible as sources for art history, institutional memory, and heritage formation.