Emden, 2023
Tarde began as a small experiment—an afternoon of folding and cutting paper, a game of formats. However, it soon evolved into something else: a means to rethink how ethnography could be practiced and shared. I had been reflecting on the minimal and often overlooked details that give texture to urban life, and I wanted to find a form that could hold those fragments without exhausting them.
In Emden, I was surrounded by cutting mats, risograph inks, and printers. The studio became both a laboratory and a press. I printed, folded, and assembled zines that treated fieldwork fragments as material evidence—pages as specimens. Tarde was never meant to explain; it was meant to show how ethnography could be a tactile, distributable, and public act.
Each issue was an experiment in method: one focused on infrastructural glitches, another on urban privatizations, another on the mundane acts of waiting or crossing a street. The zine’s form mirrored its content—compact, folded, quietly resistant to academic scale. It proposed that the smallest gestures of city life could become ethnographic artifacts if one paid enough attention.
The process of making Tarde reconnected me to design as a way of thinking. Layout became a method, typography a form of argument, and color a way of tracing relations. Through risograph printing, I rediscovered imperfection as aesthetic and epistemic value—the slight misalignments and ink saturations that speak of manual care and situated making.
This process blurred the boundaries between ethnography, art, and publishing. Tarde was an open-access ethnography, intended for circulation both within and outside academia. Its low-cost, reproducible format was a political decision—a commitment to accessibility and shared curiosity. Each issue could be downloaded, printed, and folded by anyone, anywhere.
I also saw Tarde as a pedagogical tool. In my Urban Mapping course, I began using zine-making to teach students how to observe differently—to treat layout as an argument, scale as a method, and folding as a reflection. The exercise demonstrated that ethnographic thinking thrives in formats that are dynamic, mobile, and tangible.
In retrospect, Tarde consolidated what the Artefaktenatelier had always implied: that ethnography is not just about writing but about crafting. It is an act of making visible the minimal, the irrelevant, the ordinary—those fragments that hold the density of shared worlds. Through Tarde, the Ethnographic Atelier found one of its simplest and most enduring forms: the printed fold.