Tag: Experimental Anthropology
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Six Specimens, Many Classifications
This is a field note part of Fragmented Ecologies. Every week at Samper Mendoza, I return to the same stalls and yet find new plants, new names, and new configurations. The market never repeats itself. This time, I began classifying—not scientifically, but fragmentographically. I selected six specimens: flor blanca, ruda, pepinillos, uña de gato, calaguala, and pasiflora. Each one…
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Verbing the Urban
My latest paper, Verbing the Urban: Ethnographic Idealism and the Grammar of Becoming, currently under review, began with a simple but disorienting question: what if the city were not a collection of things, but a choreography of verbs? Drawing inspiration from Jorge Luis Borges’s Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, the essay develops what I call ethnographic idealism—a speculative method that…
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Printing Ethnography Otherwise
Emden, 2023 Tarde began as a small experiment—an afternoon of folding and cutting paper, a game of formats. However, it soon evolved into something else: a means to rethink how ethnography could be practiced and shared. I had been reflecting on the minimal and often overlooked details that give texture to urban life, and I wanted…
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Glitch Infrastructures
Rachel Douglas-Jones and Tomás Criado have curated this number. Glitch: A small problem or fault that prevents something from being successful or working as well as it should. Cambridge Dictionary Cite this article: Orrego, S. 2023. “Glitch infrastructures: walking on a mosaic of failures.” Tarde 1 (Sep – Oct). DOI: 10.17605/OSF.IO/FJ5V9 Sidewalks are the most popular spaces for pedestrian circulation. They…
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From the Artefaktenatelier to the Ethnographic Studio
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…
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Tarde: A DIY Experiment in Urban Ethnography
What was Tarde? Tarde was an unfinished DIY urban ethnography zine. It evolved into a bimonthly project dedicated to capturing fragments of city life. Each issue focused on unnoticed associations and encounters that were shaping contemporary public spaces. In contrast to academic journals or glossy magazines, Tarde was provisional, handmade, and experimental. From DIY Culture to Ethnographic Publishing The…
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The Place Where I Would Like My Studio to Breathe
Some cities feel like sketches of one’s own sensibility, as if they had been quietly designing us all along. For me, that city is Copenhagen. Every time I walk its streets, I sense the possibility of an ethnographic life fully intertwined with design, community, and care. It is the place where I would like my studio…
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Between Diagrams and Labyrinths
Lübeck, 2021 By 2021, I was no longer in Munich. I had moved north, to Lübeck (after a stopover in Berlin) a quieter and more introspective place. After years of fieldwork, experiments, and travel, Lübeck became the studio I had always imagined. It was there—between canals, wooden floors, and slow winter light—that the Artefaktenatelier turned from a conceptual…
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Glitches, Rats, and Other Urban Companions
Medellín, 2021 In 2021, I returned to Medellín, my hometown, for the first time since finishing my PhD. I stayed for two months, walking the city’s streets with a different gaze—one shaped by years of thinking about artifacts, fragments, and infrastructures. This time, I wasn’t looking for order but for the interruptions, the temporary repairs, the…
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When the City Became a Studio
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.…