ABSTRACT
In this chapter Bal reflects on how contemporary artistic performances deconstruct strategies used in the sciences to perform ethnicity as a conceptual tool of exclusion in a period of ‘scientific racism and nationalism’. To what extent can such performances foster new architectures of access to the past extraterritorialised in the 1940s local communities and restore their memory in the present? This chapter begins with a critical reflection on contemporary ethnographers and performance studies, and on the exhibition strategies of ethnographic museums understood as a ‘zone of intercultural contact’. Her focus is the involvement of the sciences, especially ethnography and anthropology, in colonial practices, as a ready-made cultural scenario for the ideology of racial ‘purity’ and national identity during the Second World War and in the early years of the communist regime in Poland. The second part of the chapter is a case study of the Memory and Violence installation (2019) by Dorota Nieznalska, which aims to revisit the concept of a ‘contact zone’ (Pratt, Clifford) as re-performances of archival materials. Such contact zones offer a compelling counterpoint to exhibition strategies of the museum, becoming not only an effective epistemic tool for recognising and establishing relations with the disappearing past of local communities, but also a way of de-colonising knowledge about them.
