Santiago Orrego – Experimental Ethnography

This site is currently under renovation.

Welcome to a studio of experimental ethnography. This site curates fragments—fieldnotes, illustrations, photographs, sound, and small taxonomies—to explore urban infrastructures and more-than-human encounters. Instead of polished and complete elements, this website stores and assembles fragments, residues, traces, and other details that reveal how more-than-human worlds interconnect. Pages function as drawers: rigorous yet imaginative spaces where evidence is presented in a variety of forms, including visual, textual, and sensorial. Browse ongoing projects, methods, and maps; download materials; and join a practice that expands how ethnographic knowledge is made public today.

How to navegate this site

This site unfolds and expands through several paths that loop back into one another. It is both an interactive map and a workshop permanently under construction: a place to explore ongoing experiments in ethnography, design, STS, and care. The first link in the top menu leads to Things I’ve Done, a section where projects are presented as concise dossiers that are still open to being merged, modified, and even deleted. Each entry opens onto an expanding constellation of thoughts, process notes, illustrations, and occasional downloads, so each project becomes a trail of materials rather than a static report. From there, the second link, Ethnographic Archive, slows the pace. Here, (almost all) the published entries: fieldnotes, sketches, announcements, experiments, and cartographies are accessible in chronological order. This is chaos organized by time.

The Cabinet of Definitions works like a living legend. Its concise entries trace the conceptual vocabulary that recurs throughout my work—terms that travel between theory and field, and that keep being transformed, improved, and contested as new projects unfold. The Curricular Ecologies section extends these explorations into teaching. It gathers syllabi, field labs, and reflective essays that imagine pedagogy itself as an ethnographic and ecological practice—an open system of learning through fragments, relations, and experiments. Finally, About offers a brief academic introduction and orientation before you dive deeper. You can read straight through or wander laterally by tags and categories; the structure is linear enough to guide you, but loose enough to let discovery take the lead.