My constant attempts to return to where I believe I come from

(I wrote this last summer 2015 ... wasn't brave enough to publish)

After years of having successfully ignored any sort of social media, platform or any other virtual communication tool (apart from emails, of course), I am brave enough to return to my shabby blogger account and start another post.

I wrote my first and only post some time after having submitted my MA dissertation in 2011. The writing process of my dissertation had triggered a desire to continue writing about my personal struggle with politics and life, but unfortunately this desire got somehow swallowed up by the disillusioning development of my everyday life as working adult. I write working adult, because this is how I feel - at least sometimes - empty as this category, determined by the developments and fantasies of the market - nothing more and nothing less. But at the same time, the depressing words I started this paragraph with echo from the privileged position of someone who has been lucky enough and who got the opportunity to write a PhD on a really weird and personal project which made me resurrect this virtual site. So to keep a rather unspectacular story short, I first continued working for my old job which had stopped challenging me. Then something really great happened. I became a mother and got literally a second chance in life and on top of that a new life growing and shining next to me. It is crazy what this process of becoming a parent does to oneself. Though first everything seems to go on as normal, suddenly one starts realizing how the parameters that used to structure one's identity start shifting or shaking and it must have been from within such a subtle rearrangement of the pillars of my life that I managed to set out for a PhD on the meaning of the idea of communism in post-communist times.

So what is my project about and why have I returned to this blog? Broadly speaking, I am trying to read and interpret selected post-communist artworks as a critique of contemporary Western society (obviously following my passion for Adorno's art theory) and by doing so ask what these artworks may tell us about the other side or 'the beyond' the state they try to withdraw from. Call it communism, death or radically different future, I want to investigate what we can know of this state if we try to reflect on it mediated by the experience of post-communist artworks from former Eastern Europe - or particularly 'Poland'. And this is where this project reveals its very personal and extremely problematic site: I am trying to fill a gap, namely to answer a question which I have been renounced from asking. I have never experienced Soviet-type communism consciously, though, I have lived my whole life in its shadow. My family could have stayed in Poland instead of emigrating in 1983 to Germany and I would have been in the position to know who we are and from which place we come from - and maybe my fragmented self would have even felt more complete? I will return to these strange and big thoughts, but for now I just want to briefly explain what I am doing right now. At the moment, we, Alecs and my little daughter Theo are in Poland. We have been for one week in Sasino, together with my parents, and will be staying for the next two and a half weeks somewhere between Gdansk and Warsaw. Though I don't plan to do a formal field research, I try to collect impressions during this trip that will make me understand better what I am doing. The rest I will have to explain another time.