From The Motif Series
To assemble is to bring together without guaranteeing unity. In the studio, assembling is less about construction than about encounter—an arrangement of fragments that test each other’s weight and resonance. Ethnographic assembling is curatorial and speculative: it organizes not to finalize but to provoke relations, to keep materials vibrating in proximity. Each assemblage is a composition of differences that stay partly unruly.
The idea of assembling has a long lineage in anthropology and Science and Technology Studies. Bruno Latour (2005) reframed the social itself as an assemblage of heterogeneous actants—humans, tools, infrastructures, discourses—co-constituting networks of relation. In Reassembling the Social, Latour argues that the task of the ethnographer is “not to reveal a hidden substance called ‘the social’ but to trace the associations through which collectives are composed” (Latour 2005, 5). Assembling thus becomes a descriptive and ethical mode of inquiry: the ethnographer’s task is to gather without freezing, to let relations remain visible as movement.
Deleuze and Guattari (1987) developed the notion of agencement—the French term often translated as “assemblage”—to emphasize that an assemblage is not a static collection but a dynamic arrangement of forces, flows, and affects. Each element enters into relation through “lines of flight” that escape containment. For studio ethnography, this means allowing materials—notes, drawings, sounds—to form provisional, revisable constellations. The assemblage is a laboratory, not a monument.
In feminist and more-than-human ethnography, assembling resonates with practices of care and maintenance. María Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) writes that caring for things and worlds entails “re-assembling neglected connections.” Care, in this sense, is not repair but recomposition: an ongoing gathering of relations that sustain vitality. Annemarie Mol (2008) similarly describes the logic of care as a form of assembling that never aims for coherence but for livability. The ethnographer’s studio is such a site of caring assembly—where fragments of writing, residue, and sound are adjusted until they hold together enough to speak.
From a curatorial perspective, assembling also recalls the artist’s studio and the ethnographic museum, both spaces of juxtaposition. Mark Dion’s installations (e.g., Cabinet of Curiosities, 2001) exemplify the poetics of collecting without closure—bringing together scientific, vernacular, and waste materials in cabinets that question classification itself. Similarly, your Alterecological Specimenography turns field fragments into curated drawers, each one an experiment in partial taxonomies. Assembling, then, is a method of thinking through things: a practice of relation, hesitation, and composition.
Philosopher Jane Bennett (2010) invites us to sense “vibrant matter”—the agency distributed across assemblages of human and nonhuman forces. To assemble ethnographically is to acknowledge that agency circulates in these compositions: the smell of dust, the tone of a photograph, the rhythm of a market all participate. The studio ethnographer becomes a mediator of these vibrations, arranging without silencing, composing without closure.
Studio Exercises — Assembling as Relation
Exercise 1: The Tabletop Field
Clear a table or surface. Gather ten heterogeneous fragments from your practice: a plant cutting, a draft paragraph, a small object, a photo, a line of code, a stain. Arrange them without hierarchy. Spend five minutes moving them around silently, each move guided by intuition rather than reason. When you stop, take a photograph. Then rearrange everything again, this time following a principle (e.g., by smell, by material, by sound, by touch). Note how new relations appear and which fragments resist connection.
Exercise 2: Relational Labels
Write ten small labels on paper strips—verbs instead of nouns (leaks, hums, absorbs, shelters). Attach each label to one of the fragments on your table. The label and fragment now form a pair. Read them aloud. Then swap labels between fragments and listen again. How does meaning shift? This practice mirrors curatorial and ethnographic re-assemblage—how language co-produces material relation.
Exercise 3: The Invisible Connector
Choose two unrelated objects from your studio. Place them on opposite ends of a sheet of paper. Using thread, pencil, or tape, draw or stretch a visible line between them, but invent a story that explains what travels along that line—heat, rumor, empathy, residue, sound. This is an ethnographic diagram of speculation: the line becomes an invitation to imagine unseen mediations.
Exercise 4: The Careful Cluster
Make a small pile of discards—smudged prints, paper scraps, failed sketches. Instead of throwing them away, assemble them into a compact bundle using string, tape, or rubber bands. Hold the bundle in your hands and note its texture, weight, and smell. Give it a title that describes not what it is but what it tries to hold together. Place it on a shelf for one week as part of your studio’s ecology of fragments.
Exercise 5: Sound Cabinet
Record three sounds that represent different materials (metallic, organic, mechanical). Layer them in an audio-editing program. Adjust volumes until they coexist without drowning each other. Play the mixed sound while looking at your tabletop assemblage. Write a 100-word note about how auditory composition influences spatial composition. This is the sonic version of your specimen drawers: a cabinet of auditory relations.
References
- Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
- Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
- Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Mol, Annemarie. 2008. The Logic of Care: Health and the Problem of Patient Choice. London: Routledge.
- Puig de la Bellacasa, María. 2017. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
- Dion, Mark. 2001. Cabinet of Curiosities. London: Tate Modern.