New York, 2019
New York was not only a fieldsite but a workshop. I lived there for almost four months, closing the final stage of my doctoral research. During those weeks, I moved between Times Square and the New School — between the street’s theatrical surfaces and the building where anthropology, design, and art coexisted. That proximity between disciplines altered the way I practiced ethnography. Observation began to merge with fabrication, and the city itself started to behave like a studio.
At the New School, surrounded by artists, designers, and anthropologists, I found an atmosphere where making and thinking were inseparable. The classrooms were full of prototypes, sketches, and models; conversations moved easily between theory and material experimentation. I spent my days writing fieldnotes and my evenings watching how others gave form to ideas — through installations, textures, and print. Those moments blurred the distinction between fieldwork and studio work, showing me that ethnography could also be a process of composition.
By then, I had already envisioned the Artefaktenatelier in Munich, a workshop for ethnographic production inspired by craft, arts, and design. Yet in New York, that earlier vision found a new resonance. The city’s constant transformation — its infrastructures, lights, scaffolds, and layers of signage — gave the atelier a different meaning. It became less about the space of making and more about a mode of attention: a way of tracing how materials and gestures assemble knowledge in motion.
The city’s surfaces became part of my palette. From the blue tape that delimited performance zones in Times Square to the scratched terrazzo of public plazas, every mark felt like an ethnographic proposition. I began to photograph pavements, reflections, and shadows — not as documentation but as exercises in perception. From these walks emerged Materialtone, a series of experiments decomposing urban space into color, texture, and tone. It was my way of registering how the city speaks through matter.
That period also changed how I understood multimodality. What had started as an aspiration became an embodied practice. I moved fluidly between writing, drawing, mapping, and printing — not to illustrate fieldwork but to extend it. The multimodal was no longer a format; it was an ethnographic condition. The work of the hand, the rhythm of layering ink or sound, became part of how I thought.
Looking back, those months in New York marked a turning point. The city taught me to work with fragments and flows, to move between observation and making without hierarchy. It reaffirmed the idea that ethnography is not only about representation but about the craft of relation — the slow work of arranging, recomposing, and caring for what the world leaves us to interpret. Since then, the crossings between ethnography, art, and design have continued to grow, guiding my work and my way of seeing.
