Munich, 2017: The Artefaktenatelier
When I arrived in Munich to begin my doctoral research, I found myself surrounded by a language of precision—machines, diagrams, infrastructures, grids. The city seemed to operate as both laboratory and metaphor. It made me wonder whether ethnography could also become something other than narrative: perhaps a material experiment, a workshop of relations.
That intuition became the Artefaktenatelier. The name itself—part German, part imagined—suggested a place where artifacts, not merely texts, could emerge as epistemological devices. It was not a research group or institutional lab, but a space where thinking and making came together, allowing ethnographic encounters to take the shape of diagrams, maps, installations, and prototypes.
At the time, I felt the need to visualize how ethnography actually unfolds: not as a linear sequence of observation and writing, but as a recursive, dynamic process in which fieldwork, theory, and creativity continuously interweave. I drew the first diagram of the Artefaktenatelier to make this visible—a speculative map of relations rather than steps.
In that diagram, the “field” is not a location but an effervescent zone of relations. Objects, actors, and ideas circulate through loops of theorizing, making, discussing, and reworking. Each iteration produces a “new reality,” a version of the city transformed by creative processes and public co-creation. It was an early visualization of ethnography as design—open-ended, recursive, and collective.
The drawing became a companion to my first field experiments. I began to see diagrams, field notes, and prototypes as equally valid modes of inquiry. The Artefaktenatelier thus emerged not as a place of production but of transposition—where fragments of fieldwork could travel across media and become analytical artifacts in their own right.
In retrospect, those first sketches were less about representing knowledge and more about cultivating sensitivity: to processes, to transformations, to the subtle ways realities multiply when they are drawn. The atelier became a way to live with that multiplicity—to remain in the recursive motion between knowing, making, and being affected.
From this Munich desk, the foundations of what I now call the ethnographic studio were laid. The Artefaktenatelier taught me that ethnography could be multimodal, that its objects might be diagrams, maps, or prototypes, and that each of them could think in its own way. The rest of the story—Times Square, the labyrinth, and beyond—would grow from this first experiment.