I didn’t stop making zines when Tarde slowed down. If anything, I doubled down. I kept folding, cutting, layering, and testing what printed matter can do to ethnography. But at some point, it became clear: the questions that animated Tarde—studio-based experimentation, minimal motifs, and hands-on field exercises—were starting to spill beyond their original frame.
That’s where MINIMA comes in. Launching MINIMA is not about replacing Tarde, or declaring that one project “failed” and another “succeeds.” It’s about admitting that I needed a different vantage point—and a different kind of paper machine—to keep asking how ethnography can hack the urban.
What TARDE made possible
Tarde grew out of Studio Ethnography: a way of doing anthropology with and through a studio practice. It was riso-printed, object-based, and methodologically ambitious.
Each issue had a two-part structure:
- A first booklet that introduced a topic and a motif—something minimal and seemingly irrelevant to urban life (a fold, a cut, a residue, a tiny device, an overlooked surface)—and turned it into a conceptual lens.
- A second booklet that proposed a hands-on empirical exercise: a concrete way to go out, notice, collect, and experiment with that motif in situ.
So Tarde was never purely introspective. It already contained a field component: prompts to walk, observe, test, and make small inquiries in the city. But these exercises were still anchored in the notion of the motif—a small, almost infraordinary element that quietly reorganized perception.
Looking back, Tarde was a training ground: a place to prototype methods, formats, and graphic languages, and to see how minimal topics and simple exercises could recalibrate attention in both studio and field.
That work doesn’t disappear. Tarde remains an archive and a toolbox I still return to.
Why MINIMA needed to exist
MINIMA appears at the moment when those motif-based experiments want to scale sideways: toward more explicit urban hacking, collaboration, and pedagogical use.
Where Tarde was framed as a series of studio-borne motif experiments with accompanying exercises, MINIMA is framed from the start as a:
Minimanual of urban hacking / minimanual de hackeo urbano
Each issue:
- Focuses on a specific hacking gesture (a tactic, a method, an urban misuse, or re-reading).
- Initially, it is bilingual (Spanish/English) to move between publics and contexts.
- Includes hands-on exercises that are designed to be run in workshops, classrooms, collectives, and solitary walks.
- Comes with a minimal visual kit: diagrams, maps, specimen labels, timelines, and notational devices ready to be photocopied, annotated, and misused.
If Tarde was an experimental zine series that contained empirical exercises, MINIMA is a zine series that is structured as an exercise from the outset—a micromanual.
Continuity: still a zine, still a lab
The transition is not about abandoning a medium. I’m still:
- Working with zines, folds, cheap papers, and single-ink aesthetics.
- Treating each publication as a methodological device, not just a container.
- Designing for reproducibility: photocopying, scanning, scribbling, and re-printing as part of the method.
What changes is the orientation and emphasis:
- From motifs that also generated exercises (Tarde),
to exercises and hacks that also generate concepts (MINIMA).
In that sense, MINIMA grows directly out of Tarde’s hands-on ethos:
- The idea that theory can be folded into a small booklet and tested in the field.
- The belief that minimal, “irrelevant” details can be methodological triggers.
- The conviction that zines are not just documentation but active tools for doing ethnography.
Tarde remains in a drawer in the larger cabinet; MINIMA opens another, labeled “urban hacking.”
What changes: from motifs to hacks
The real shift is in the direction the experiments are pointing.
- From motif to hack
- In Tarde, the starting point was: “What happens if we take this tiny, minimal thing seriously?”
- In MINIMA, the starting point is: “What happens if we deliberately interfere with how the city usually works?”
- From exercises as add-ons to exercises as spine
- In Tarde, the empirical booklet was a powerful second half.
- In MINIMA, the exercise is the issue’s skeleton: everything else (text, diagrams, glossary, specimen) orbits around it.
- From studio+field experiments to urban-facing protocols
- Tarde’s exercises were often intimate, almost like personal field scores.
- MINIMA frames its hacks as protocols meant to be shared, taught, and adapted, for example, in hackathons, workshops, and collective walks.
New angles on doing urban research
By moving from Tarde to MINIMA, I’m also shifting how I imagine urban research:
- Research as an open protocol
MINIMA’s exercises are minor, repeatable procedures—mini-protocols—rather than case-specific methods. They invite others to re-run, mutate, and document them on their own sites.
- More-than-human and grounded
The focus on more-than-human entanglements remains—pigeons, plants in cracks, trash infrastructures, cleaning tools, informal recyclers—but is now woven into concrete hacks: ways of tuning into their worlds while resisting capture or romanticization.
- DIY urbanism as an ethnographic device
Zines always carried a DIY, insurgent energy. With MINIMA, that energy is explicitly aimed at the city’s OS: traffic flows, signage, interfaces, and schedules. The minimanual format turns ethnography into a portable kit for commutes, night shifts, walks, and idle waits.
Not a replacement, but a branching
So why “move” from Tarde to MINIMA?
Because sometimes a research trajectory needs to branch:
- Tarde holds the motif-based, studio+field experiments: minimal topics, two-part issues, empirical booklets that test attention.
- MINIMA holds the urban hacking branch: micromanuals, explicit protocols, pedagogical tools, and collaborative exercises.
Both remain active. Diagrams and exercises from Tarde can reappear in MINIMA, adapted as visual kits. Hacks tested through MINIMA can return to the studio as new motifs.
The transition is less about leaving something behind and more about redistributing emphasis:
From experimenting with minimal things to using those experiments to interfere with the city strategically.
If Tarde was for learning how to work with minimal motifs and empirical exercises, MINIMA is for deploying those lessons as urban hacks. And I’m interested in keeping both in play.
Can both projects coexist? For sure.
Tarde and MINIMA are not in competition. They live on different shelves of the same cabinet.
- Tarde continues as a motif-driven studio+field lab: minimal topics, double booklets, empirical exercises that recalibrate attention.
- MINIMA unfolds as a micromanual series for urban hacking: portable kits, protocols, and visual tools that invite others to experiment.
Sometimes a new MINIMA issue will start from an old Tarde motif. Sometimes a Tarde exercise will be retrofitted as a MINIMA hack. The point is not to choose between them, but to let them cross-pollinate—one more introspective and experimental, the other more pedagogical and urban-facing.
So yes, both projects coexist. They map different but connected ways of asking the same question:
How can printed matter become a method for doing—and re-doing—the city?