Hello everyone. Thank you for being here today. My name is Anna Gonzalez Suero.
My areas of interest include artistic research, feminist theories of the body, and the
field of autoethnography. I call this presentation On Teaching Artistic Autoethnography in Germany.
The package with the book arrived on an autumn day, and I was very excited. I placed the
package on my kitchen table and covered it with leaves I had collected the day before.
Then I waited. I later removed the leaves from the package to open it, and there was
the book. I could finally hold my book in my hands. The title is An Artistic Autoethnography
on the Public Fetus. Feminist Perspectives. The book presents key findings from my PhD research
on the use of gynecological ultrasound, preconception health, and the visual politics of
reproductive rights. The stories in the book connect art with feminist science studies
dealing with the construction of the fetus and motherhood from a historical perspective.
It engages with questions around artistic identity, philosophies of Gestalt and visual perception,
and with theories of liminality and hybridity. Holding the book in my hand, I opened it,
I looked through it, I closed it again, and I opened it again. In the book, I reflect
on my artistic work. I used the autoethnographic methods of introspection and emotional recall
to critically reflect on my artistic work with the iconic image of the fetus.
Fetus images were once rare, but this changed drastically in the 1960s when photographic-like images
of the fetus began to appear in popular media. Highly aestheticized images that visually
represent the fetus in the foreground disconnected from the pregnant individual. The way in which
the visually isolated fetus became a cultural pop icon, how the image has been used beyond
the clinical context to commodify pregnancy and to serve political agendas has made possible
what is known in feminist scholarship as the public fetus. For almost 15 years, I created
artistic variations of the iconic fetus using a variety of materials like paper and wood.
At the time when these pictures were taken and when I was still working with this iconic form,
I had not yet engaged with feminist histories and theories of the public fetus. I simply started
working with this massively reproduced media icon without connecting it to my personal
experiences, my cultural background, and without dealing with the political dimensions of the
image and its problematic history. I had made them colorful, enlarged them many times their
original size, carried them across rooms, and transported them across cities. To be framed
and displayed in art galleries where, when asked about the meanings of my artistic fetus forms,
I struggled to tell others what the work was getting at.
Eventually, in 2015, I got stuck with my artistic practice. After many years of working with these
forms, I could not work with them anymore. And as you can see here, which shows part of my PhD
annual progress report dated from 2018, the reviewers were concerned about the pace of my
artistic research progress. The additional comment reads,
training in autoethnography, a methodology I had not heard of before. They were right.
Autoethnography was for me the key to understand that my artistic block was not a personal failure.
My artistic block was deeply rooted in the ways in which modern, liberalist, western science,
medicine, and technology define gender as a binary.
And I took my autoethnographic research as a starting point to talk about feminist issues.
And later, I went on to get my story published as a book.
After telling you a little bit about how I came to autoethnography during my PhD journey,
I want to talk about teaching autoethnography to art students. I had the opportunity to teach
autoethnography to students from the Faculty of Art and Design at the Bauhaus University Weimar
in the summer semester of 2024. The seminar was called Practicing Autoethnography as an
Artistic Research Tool. And in the seminar, there were 16 students. Only a few of them
had heard of autoethnography. Most of them had not explored it in practice.
The sessions were a mixture of discussion and practical writing exercises.
A lot was covered in a short period of time. And I was curious to see if autoethnography
could be learned and practiced in such a short time.
To contextualize the seminar, here's an overview of my postdoc project.
The title is Storing Artistic Research Using Methods of Autoethnography.
I'm trying to understand the relationship between artistic research and autoethnography
in the particular context of Germany. What makes researching the situation of
autoethnography in Germany so exciting is that the methodology is much less established in
this context than in English-speaking countries. The seminar on practicing autoethnography as an
artistic research tool was one part of the larger project I'm currently working on.
The second part is a literature review of explicitly autoethnographic texts by researchers
affiliated to universities in Germany over the past two decades. Like I said, little is known
about the key features that characterize German language autoethnography. And with my literature
review, I aim to make these more accessible to English speakers. The third part is an interview
study with researchers from different disciplines at German universities about their personal and
professional experiences with autoethnography. Here you can see a description of the assignment
I gave the seminar participants. I asked them to choose a past artistic project that they were
interested in investigating from an autoethnographic perspective. In what follows, I present excerpts
from autoethnographic stories of two seminar participants who gave me permission to share them here.
The first excerpt is from an autoethnographic story titled Babulya by Polina Mitiaeva.
It is important for you to know that this story deals with the author's
feelings of loss for her grandmother. I'm reading from Polina's story.
Reflecting on this autoethnography, I find myself grappling with the distance between generations,
particularly the desire to share my artistic endeavors with my grandmother, my Babulya.
This realization that my work and my world might not be understood by her, leading to feelings of
alienation and disconnection in moments where we seek closeness. This disconnection also reflects
how certain figures, like grandmothers, might not fit into this fast-paced world, especially in the
world of anime, which is the main field for my artistic projects. Anime-like mediums often
prioritize the experiences and perspectives of youth. Reflecting on these differences,
I uncover deeper truths about the limitations and possibilities within my creative work.
The second excerpt is from an autoethnographic story titled Birthday Visit by Marina Ramoska.
This story is about how a birthday visit to a retirement home in Germany
provokes difficult feelings in the author about their
distant relationship with their aging parents in Brazil. I'm reading from Marina's story.
The autoethnographic process has encouraged me to engage in conversations I hadn't thought of actively
pursuing before, with my friends and my partner. The conversation with my mother was also quite
interesting for me, as this is something we hadn't talked about before, and we might not have talked
about if I hadn't been writing this autoethnography. This autoethnography was an opportunity for me to
externalize thoughts that had been in my head for a while, and now, having written and reflected
on my writing process and relationships, I feel more at ease when thinking about my future choices
and also more capable of having these types of conversations and empower to do so.
Before writing this autoethnography, I couldn't think of many projects of mine that deal with
these questions of life. However, now, I believe that they have always been present in my practice.
The students' reflections point at how they benefited personally and artistically from their
autoethnographic writing. Not only did they find new meanings in their creative practice,
their autoethnographic writing also initiated a process of clarification in terms of how
they perceive their roles and relationships with others. Almost all of the seminar participants
completed the assignment, and I had the feeling that they had gained a new valuable tool for
themselves, a tool they had not worked with before. I intend to continue exploring autoethnography
as a potentially beneficial tool for art students, while also working to publish key findings from
my literature review and the interview study about autoethnography in Germany.
I want to end this presentation with a big thank you to the Bauhaus University Weimar for supporting
my postdoc project. Thank you.