Emden, 2023
By 2023, I had moved again—this time to Emden, a small port city in northern Germany. It was there, in a modest office filled with papers, plants, and printed maps, that the Artefaktenatelier began to expand beyond its original form. What started as a conceptual and doctoral experiment was now becoming an ongoing studio practice: a way of living, teaching, and doing ethnography otherwise.
In Emden, I finally had the space and rhythm to work materially—to cut, print, bind, and draw. I was teaching Urban Mapping, experimenting with multimodal assignments, and creating the first issues of Tarde, a small ethnographic zine that collected fragments of urban encounters. Each issue was a combination of fieldwork and publication, echoing the experimental spirit that had guided the Artefaktenatelier since its inception in Munich.
At the same time, I was developing a new project: Infrastructuring Multispecies Encounters, an ethnographic investigation of Berlin’s petting zoos as urban infrastructures. These sites, where humans and animals share routines of feeding, cleaning, and watching, have become laboratories for thinking about how more-than-human life co-produces urban space. The project fused my interests in multispecies ethnography, design, and cartography—extending the atelier’s speculative methods into a new ecological domain.
Emden marked a transition from diagramming to infrastructuring. The studio was no longer only about representing the urban but about assembling it—through zines, maps, and collaborative research devices. I began to imagine the Artefaktenatelier as part of a larger ecosystem: The Ethnographic Atelier, a collective practice for producing multimodal artifacts and epistemological tools grounded in more-than-human ethnography.
The projects I was nurturing—Tarde, Materialtone, Multispecies Encounters and cartographies —shared a sensibility toward fragments, textures, and care. Each one was a continuation of the same inquiry: how can ethnography be practiced through form, through artifacts that think, invite, and provoke? The atelier was becoming not just a methodology but a philosophy of making-with.
Teaching, printing, and fieldwork converged into a daily rhythm of experimentation. Students mapped sensory patterns of cities, I printed risograph zines in the evenings, and drafts of new projects covered the walls. It was a time of creative abundance—a small ecosystem of ethnographic making that blurred the boundaries between research, pedagogy, and art.
From Emden, the Artefaktenatelier looked less like a project and more like an infrastructure for thinking—a moving constellation of experiments that continued to evolve. The Ethnographic Atelier now serves as its current manifestation: a transdisciplinary studio for multimodal ethnography, grounded in care, curiosity, and material imagination. It remains unfinished, as all studios should be.