Substitut is a Berlin-based production company and picture agency whose projects mainly focus on sub- and counterculture in the GDR. Their main emphasis is punk.
In 2005 Substitut organised the exhibition “Too Much Future” that gave an in-depth look at the topic punk in the GDR. It showed how countercultures can develop in a dictatorship, which influences they exert outside this counterculture and with which repression its members had to fight.
The exhibition eventually developed into a multi-media archive which is named “Substitut” too. The archive incorporates private and professional documents, mainly from the 80s. Those include music-recordings and movies as well as files from the Ministry of State Security. It also contains extensive graphical material like posters, flyers, photographs, and paintings.