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 complete accounts, it assembles residues, traces, and delicate details that reveal how 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 along several paths that loop back into one another. It is both a map and a workshop: a place to explore ongoing experiments in ethnography, design, and care. The top menu leads to Things I’ve Done, where projects are presented as concise dossiers. Each entry opens onto a constellation of process notes, images, and occasional downloads—zines, maps, or small datasets—so that a project becomes a trail of materials rather than a static report. From there, the Ethnographic Archive slows the pace. Fieldnotes, sketches, and cartographies accumulate as situated fragments, tagged and cross-referenced to surface kinships across places, methods, and concerns.

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 evolving 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.