ABSTRACT
The author sought to gain a better understanding of ancestry tracing and how visual, oral, sculptural narratives are used to generate identities. It soon became clear that the different stories we were telling and showing to each other were all, in one way or another, responses to questions of genealogy, social order and identity. For the last few years, the performance artist Mo Diener has been pursuing an artistic research project on the genealogy of her own family. Yet, instead of undergoing genetic testing, Mo started to combine her artistic approach with an ethnographic research method. Scientific knowledge opens up space for the imagination about origin, relatives, migration, and uncontaminated by problems, conflicts, fears. By the artistic work the stuffed animal as well as the genetic information becomes visible as crafted objects. People had clothes on a washing-line that had to be washed many times before the daughter could start working with them artistically.
