In Fragmented Ecologies, I explore how fragments—of plants, substances, and stories—move through Bogotá’s urban markets as living forms of knowledge, care, and classification. What interests me is not only what these fragments are, but what they do: how a crushed leaf, a powdered root, or a whispered recipe can travel between people, species, and cosmologies. Through these circulations, fragments become mediators between vernacular and more-than-human worlds, carrying traces of histories that resist neat containment.
To study these movements, I developed an experimental ethnographic method I call fragmentography. This approach treats the broken, the partial, and the drifting not as limitations but as the very conditions of knowledge-making. Rather than seeking to reconstruct wholes, fragmentography follows how pieces are exchanged, reassembled, or left to decay. It is a curatorial practice that embraces incompleteness, inviting fragments to speak in their own languages—through textures, smells, and gestures—while attending to the ethical and aesthetic implications of collecting and classifying them.
By combining ethnography, visual documentation, and poetic taxonomy, I aim to understand how urban markets stage ongoing negotiations between order and disorder, nature and artifice, care and commerce. The project reimagines ethnography as a practice of attention and assembly, one that learns from the ephemeral rather than the monumental. In doing so, Fragmented Ecologies challenges Western taxonomic traditions and proposes a different way of seeing ecology—one that is always already fragmented, yet persistently alive in its recompositions.
