Epipoetic Un-Deception: AesthEtics of Reproduction and Kinship Rupture

This practice-based (PhD) project connects art-historical research on a UNESCO colour-reproduction project in painting with an auto-ethnographic archaeology of my own reproductive history. The latter is the focus of the presentation, which reflects on the relationship between original and reproduction in a biological-biographical exploration. After 33 years, the revelation that my presumed father is not biological—my actual father a bisexual friend and former lover of my parents—acts as an epistemic rupture that unsettles genealogical, bodily and narrative models of the self. My parents relied on what we would today call a queer relational constellation to overcome infertility and conceive a child, yet could or would not speak about it openly—silenced by muteness around reproduction and by a secrecy regime of a prudish GDR society.

The proposal explores how a family secret and its late disclosure produce endangered conceptual worlds of kinship, inheritance and identity, shaped by shame, secrecy and heteronormative expectations. The project asks how situated knowledges and minoritised life and love stories become speakable in artistic research and how autotheory and autoethnography can reframe such experiences as sources of insight rather than deficit. The German term „Ent‑täuschung“ (un‑deception) becomes a conceptual tool for thinking transformation and liberation together with loss and disorientation.

The presentation aligns with language-based artistic research and concept‑mapping practices. The poster operates as a poetic concept map at the threshold of image and text, (in)visibility and (un)readability, blending essayistic and poetic writing with diagrammatic, painterly and possibly wall-based marks. A brief live writing/mapping sequence will activate this material on site, inviting participants to share processes of making seeable and sayable what has (long) remained unsaid.