Paper Short Abstract:

The presentation is dedicated to ethnographic collaboration with art, focused on researching people-objects relationships. We will reflect on the lack of compatibility between the artist's strategy (“the politics of sarcasm”) and the specificity of the ethnographic perspective.

Paper Abstract:

The project entitled “The order of things. Relationships with pre-war objects in the western territories of Poland” (2019-2022) was dedicated to people-object relations in a particular context: in the regions incorporated into the Polish borders after World War II. The research process was focused on the objects that had originally belonged to resettled German citizens and remained in the areas successively inhabited by the newcomers. Seventy years after the establishment of the “new post-war order”, we asked the current owners how these pre-war objects are used, what practices they generate, and how they are narrativised.

In our research, we employed a combination of ethnographic and artistic tools. We – the ethnographers - collaborated with Łukasz Skąpski, an artist who used the medium of photography to reveal the relationality of people, things and places. Although our activities mutually fueled each other, our collaboration proved to be largely based on disparities and disagreement, at times resembling the management of conflict. Skąpski's work is being described as “trickster-like” (Wojciech Szymański) and based on mockery and irony treated as tools of artistic practice (Jarosław Lubiak), the effects of which are often interpreted in terms of social criticism.

In our paper, we will reflect on the difficulties that the mentioned strategy entails and explore their eventual potentials in the ethnographic research process. We will explain why this form of collaboration has directed us to approach the titular issue of the project from a class perspective.