Growing into epistemic knowledge through performance: Rosanna Raymond’s “Soli I Tai—Soli I Uta” at Berlin’s Ethnological Museum

Abstract

This article explores Rosanna Raymond’s performative intervention titled “Soli I Tai—Soli I Uta” (Tread on the Sea—Tread on the Land). Today, many cultural institutions try to develop progressive strategies to facilitate “intercultural dialogue.” In this endeavor, performative strategies are explored, some of which are developed in collaboration with experts from so-called “source communities.” Such collaborations have longer histories in Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, or Canada. In central Europe, and especially in Germany, this has been a more recent development. One prominent example is the one-month artist residency of the Pacific artist Rosanna Raymond (b. 1967) at the Ethnological Museum Berlin in 2014, which culminated in her “acti.VA.tion” entitled “Soli I Tai—Soli I Uta.” My article analyzes how Raymond’s performative intervention dramaturgically put different epistemic systems and “ways of knowing” into a contrasting relationship and thus enabled spectators to gain declarative epistemic knowledge, that is to say, knowledge about knowledge and different “ways of knowing.”