The Motif Series

This body of reflections transforms Studio Ethnography into a hands-on methodological laboratory. Each entry centers on a material or procedural motif — such as folding, cutting, residue, or iteration — explored as both concept and operation. Unlike the Cabinet of Definitions, these entries are not conceptual definitions but operational reflections: things to try, make, or test. They invite readers to engage through practice, not only thought.

These motifs emerge from the gestures and sensibilities that shape the everyday life of the studio — the acts of adjusting, layering, erasing, and recomposing that underlie ethnographic creation. Each one works as a tool and a provocation: an invitation to pause, to attend, to get one’s hands dirty. Through them, method becomes tactile. They reveal how ethnography takes form through material contact, repetition, and the friction between precision and error.

The series thus operates like a manual of attention rather than a collection of ideas. It invites a mode of ethnographic thinking that unfolds through doing: folding paper to understand entanglement, cutting text to explore omission, tracing lines to follow relations, calibrating tone to sense atmosphere. These reflections offer small exercises in method — provisional, revisable, and alive — through which experimental ethnography can be practiced rather than just described.

A catalog of operations →