Contribution short abstract:

In this paper, I discuss my use of soliloquies for expressing experiences of aporia and haunting during cultural activism in post-East Prussian Poland. Soliloquies are part of an auto-ethnographic montage that captures different voices and roles as entangled anthropologist-cum-producer and citizen.

Contribution long abstract:

Soliloquies became a way for me to express my experiences of aporia and haunting being the founding director of a performing arts event in my fieldsite in post-East Prussian Poland. Aporia here describes a dilemma that evolved within enduring power relationships and unequal interdependencies, politics of value and claims to meaning-making. It emerged between my desire for a cultural activism that makes space for marginalized communities and that creates encounters between disjointed social groups, and the process of a gradual appropriation of the performing arts event by transnational stakeholders. I realized that my work as entangled anthropologist simultaneously countered this process of appropriation and facilitated it. Confronting this dilemma, I was haunted by the violent pasts of the area and standing on constantly shaking moral grounds.

My writing consists of an ethnographic analysis that is repeatedly disrupted and complemented by soliloquies, snippets of my returning interior dialogues since founding the cultural event. Soliloquies are thus part of an auto-ethnographic montage [Nielsen 2013] that captures my different roles as anthropologist-cum-producer, practitioner, observer, activist, academic, citizen. They add to the phenomenology of my embodied ambivalence, telling a story of disjuncture between internal, private expressions and outward manifestations [Irving 2011: 24] and of a vivid two-way knowledge exchange and translation. The auto-ethnographic montage captures the situated odds of producing a cultural event as German national in post-East Prussian Poland. It moves through external pressures, internalised loyalties, and power inequalities, in a situation marked by the seductiveness and responsibility that come with exceptional privilege.