Together with my dear friend Carla Boserman, we have just published an article on the small power of anthotypes as an affective aesthetics for the urban climatic mutation.
Solar Drawings and Moving Shades: An Affective Aesthetics for the Urban Climatic Mutation
In a world saturated with planetary images that compel but rarely mobilize, we turn to solar drawings as an affective aesthetics for climate action. Ho,w can drawing attune us to changing landscapes while supporting transdisciplinary inquiries? We explored this in a workshop held in Barcelona in 2024, focusing on urban shades and extreme heat. At its core were anthotypes—solar drawings made with spinach emulsion—used to record the flickering presence of shades in different urban arenas. Thinking with anthotypes allows us to be affected by solar exposure as a planetary condition, reframing shades as inhabited or inhabitable regions. As we see it, these unstable records can become relevant forms of experiential research, activating embodied visual sensitivities to correspond to worlds undergoing climatic mutation through speculative explorations that seek to take overheated urban milieus into our own drawing hands.
Dibujos solares y sombras móviles: Una estética afectiva para la mutación climática urbana
En un mundo saturado de imágenes planetarias que cautivan pero rara vez movilizan, recurrimos al dibujo solar como una estética afectiva para la acción climática. ¿Cómo puede el dibujo sintonizarnos con paisajes en transformación y, al mismo tiempo, sustentar indagaciones transdisciplinarias? Exploramos esta cuestión en un taller realizado en Barcelona en 2024 sobre las sombras urbanas y el calor extremo. El núcleo del trabajo fueron las antotipias —dibujos solares realizados con emulsión de espinacas— utilizadas para registrar la presencia crepitante de las sombras en diferentes entornos urbanos. Pensar con antotipias permite dejarnos afectar por la exposición solar como una condición planetaria, reformulando las sombras como regiones habitadas o habitables. A nuestro entender, estos registros inestables pueden convertirse en formas relevantes de investigación experiencial, activando sensibilidades visuales encarnadas para corresponder a mundos en mutación climática a través de exploraciones especulativas que busquen hacerse cargo de los entornos urbanos sobrecalentados con nuestras propias manos dibujantes.
How to quote: Criado, T.S. & Boserman, C. (2026). Solar Drawings and Moving Shades: An Affective Aesthetics for the Urban Climatic Mutation | Dibujos solares y sombras móviles: Una estética afectiva para la mutación climática urbana. Diseña, 28 Article.4 | PDF (English) – PDF (Español)
For the last couple of years Marina Peterson and Gretchen Bakke have been putting together Errant Elements, a beautiful project to create a chapbook series organized around the Periodic Table of the Elements.
In their words:
Dmitri Mendeleev left gaps in his model of the periodic table for the not-yet-known — elements that the prior century sought to standardize and classify by atomic weight and chemical properties — to allow history to fill in, but not to leave open to speculation, or to leave alone. What can be made from what is that isn’t yet? How might the elements be constitutive of something different? What is missing or lacking? How can those absences be incorporated or invented into the base materials? What needs to change from what we have to make what we don’t have?
The form – 118 folded chapbooks designed to be combined in various ways – supports a collective exploration of the combinatory affordances and stories of the elements. The format is a trifold brochure that folds into a 5×5” square. This allows readers to connect pieces in different ways, constructing official or imagined elements and reading across diverse entries in ways that open new imaginaries.
Thanks to their gracious invitation, I took the chance to propose a submission on the element Pa (Protractinium) or, rather, in my attempt: “Pavements” – but also “Panot”, something of a particular obsession of mine since I started doing fieldwork on urban accessibility.
My errant element starts like this:
Poor pavements, nobody seems to be thinking of them. Unless they are broken, that is. This invisibility is telling
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You could check it out below. But, FYI, the whole set of chapbooks will be for sale. Contact the editors for more info!
How to quote: Criado, T.S. (2025.) Pa – “Pavement” but also “Panot”. In M. Peterson & G. Bakke (Eds.) Errant Elements, issue 2: 91. | PDF
Durant aquest any Nusos Coop, Arquitectura de Contacte i el Departament d’Umbrologia (un projecte del grup de recerca CareNet de la UOC) hem estat analitzant i reflexionant la importància de les ombres i l’impacte de la calor en la vida social a l’espai públic, com a part del projecte FEM COMUNITAT A L’OMBRA, amb el suport de l’Ajuntament de Barcelona.
El proper dilluns dia 15 de desembre a les 16h a la Fàbrica del Sol (Pg. de Salvat Papasseit, 1 – Barcelona) us convidem a la presentació de la Guia: La ciutat de les ombres, resultat d’aquest projecte. Una guia com a recurs per analitzar, comprendre, imaginar, intervenir i recordar les ombres urbanes.
After more than a year of work writing and designing the kit, we have finally received the printed copies from the press!
Unboxing of the kit, picture by Andrew Gilbert
Written by Judith Albrecht, Tomás Criado, Ignacio Farías, Andrew Gilbert, Carla J Maier. Published CC BY SA Institut für Europäische Ethnologie · HU Berlin, 2025 [ISBN 978-3-00-084575-8]
This kit provides a set of practical exercises and a framework for valuing and assessing multimodal works. It recognizes their unique capacity to weave together and activate diverse media forms, collaborative practices, and public engagement while expanding the traditional boundaries of anthropological knowledge production.
This kit is intentionally designed as an open-ended, dynamic resource. We are certain that there are dimensions we have overlooked and anticipate that new dimensions will emerge through its use. This is why you’ll find blank cards, expandable lists, adaptable templates, and blank pages throughout the kit – they are invitations for you to contribute your own insights, document new approaches, and expand the kit based on your experiences in appreciating and evaluating multimodal works. Your engagement with the kit actively shapes its evolution, making it a lively and collectively enriched resource rather than a fixed set of instructions.
This joint endeavour has been very long in the making: first drafted as a book proposal in 2019, it slowly grew into a positional essay, which has had many lives before its current instantiation.
We have benefitted from the very constructive feedback of JRAI’s editorial team and peer reviewers, whose insights have allowed us to bring it to fruition.
My university, the Open University of Catalonia, has funded the OA publication of the article, which is now out here: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.70017
Besides, we’ve had the immense luck of receiving commentaries by Tim Ingold and George E. Marcus, to whom we wish to extend our warmest gratitude for their time and insight.
For an inviting anthropology
Abstract
Anthropologists have recently become inspired, captivated even, by the practices of the arts, design, and architecture in efforts to renew anthropology’s modes of engagement and understandings of its relevance, particularly affecting how we approach ethnographic fieldwork. Having each worked for well over a decade at these crossroads, the authors reflect on a search for anthropological relevance undertaken through collaborative materializations of the field, in situations where anthropologists go beyond gestures of cultural critique and participant observation. This entails creating hosting environments where our counterparts turn not just into co-ethnographers or co-thinkers, but also and mainly into ethnographic guests. The idea is familiar in a discipline rooted in forcing uninvited visits on hosts around the world. However, in our material explorations, we envision a different route. For us, hosting, as a mode of inquiry, provides openings to a more inviting anthropology, involving zones of mutual uncertainty among a multiplicity of actors so as to instil generative puzzlement without imposing our discipline on others. We conclude by making a plea for practising anthropology as a field of invitations in hopes of remaking worlds together with our ethnographic guests.
Pour une anthropologie accueillante
Résumé
Les pratiques des arts, du design et de l’architecture sont récemment devenues une source d’inspiration, voire de fascination, pour les anthropologues, qui y voient un moyen de renouveler les modes d’engagement de l’anthropologie et l’appréhension de sa pertinence, notamment dans la manière d’aborder le travail de terrain ethnographique. Après avoir travaillé chacun pendant une bonne dizaine d’années à cette croisée des chemins, les auteurs réfléchissent à la recherche d’une pertinence anthropologique par des matérialisations collaboratives sur le terrain, dans des situations où les anthropologues vont au-delà des gestes de la critique culturelle et de l’observation des participants. Il s’agit de créer des environnements d’accueil dans lesquels nos interlocuteurs ne sont pas seulement co-ethnographes ou co-penseurs mais aussi, et surtout, des invités ethnographiques. L’idée est familière, dans une discipline fondée sur le fait de s’imposer chez les gens partout dans le monde sans y avoir été invité. Dans leurs explorations matérielles, les auteurs envisagent une voie différente : pour eux, accueillir est un mode d’investigation qui inaugure une anthropologie plus ouverte, dans laquelle les zones d’incertitude mutuelle entre une multitude d’acteurs leur permettent de susciter une perplexité générative sans imposer leur discipline aux autres. En conclusion, ils plaident pour une anthropologie pratiquée comme un champ d’invitations, dans l’espoir de refaire le monde avec leurs invités ethnographiques.
Editado por Adolfo Estalella, Tomás Criado y Francisco Martínez
Este foro sitúa la experimentación como un impulso creciente en antropología que desborda la escritura permeando el análisis, el trabajo de campo, la teorización y la representación. Las contribuciones que aquí recogemos entienden la experimentación etnográfica como el diseño de situaciones, dispositivos y colaboraciones que refiguran nuestras relaciones con lo empírico y lo analítico mediante prototipados, mediaciones materiales y modos performativos de indagación. Este giro responde a la insuficiencia de métodos y formatos heredados para abordar problemas contemporáneos, cuestionando así las formas y normas de la disciplina. A través de un repertorio de proyectos en todo el arco hispanoparlante, la atención a la experimentación en el momento empírico nos permite expandir la etnografía, pensar con las contrapartes, y convertir a nuestros interlocutores en acompañantes epistémicos antes, durante, y después del trabajo de campo. En diálogo con tradiciones colaborativas y comprometidas, la propuesta perfila una estética y ética propias y muestra su despliegue más allá del norte global. La colección convoca a antropólogos y antropólogas hispanohablantes de Europa y América para proponer un vocabulario que cartografíe este territorio, exhiba su vitalidad y explore las posibilidades que abre para rehacer la etnografía con otras y otros.
ÍNDICE
Introducción, Adolfo Estalella (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas), Tomás Criado (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya) y Francisco Martínez (Universidad de Murcia)
Co-fabular. Isaac Marrero Guillamón (Universidad de Barcelona)
Conjurar. Ricardo Greene (Universidad San Sebastián)
Dejar hacer. Francisco Martínez (Universidad de Murcia)
Desconcierto. Diana Espirito Santo (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile)
(Des)plegar. Santiago Orrego (Universidad Humboldt de Berlín)
It is organized around eight key themes and concepts that have marked anthropological debates in Europe over the past 20 years. Featuring engaging contributions, anthropologists from different generations and backgrounds come together to collaboratively reflect on questions that keep recurring throughout the book series. As a tribute to anthropology in and of Europe, the book is an experiment in collaboration as much as a testament to anthropology’s vitality and relevance in a world which sees itself confronted by challenges of planetary dimension.
I was honoured to have been invited by the editor to act as ‘chapter editor’ of a reflection on the transformations of ethnography in the recent decades, tasked with selecting collaborators to accompany me in this reflection. Following an editorial suggestion, these were to be ethnographers at different stages of their careers, experimenting with and exploring the mediaof ethnography and a wide range of problems. At the editors’ request, these were t be relevant colleagues different from my regular cothinkers or coinstigators. Also, it required finding the appropriate way of discussing these matters without the grounds of existing knowledge or interactions, and without a suitable opportunity to meet in person to do this. To respond to this challenge, I conceived my role less as an editor and more as a ‘host’: the facilitator of a collaborative process, creating the conditions for the conversation to be fruitful in a rather open-ended way
I had the immense luck of counting on the following guests for our conversations ‘in the kitchen’ of more than textual ethnography:
Maka Suárez, part of the Kaleidos collective (Universidad de Cuenca, Ecuador), who collaborated in the construction of the digital ethnographic platform (EthnoData) designed by Jorge Núñez to pursue research and public engagement work on data practices in and around different forms of violence in Ecuador.
Claudio Sopranzetti, coauthor of The King of Bangkok, a collaborative ethno- graphic novel with editor and translator Chiara Natalucci and illustrator Sara Fabbri based on fieldwork on political movements in Thailand.
Indrawan Prabaharyaka, a member of Labtek Apung (Floating Tech-Lab), a collective whose members are a chemist, an engineer, a visual artist, an architect, and an anthropologist. We work on urban ecology We have done several projects on river pollution, we are currently experimenting with architectural- cinematographic techniques to immerse in and engage with the world of nonhuman primates in Muaragembong, mangrove patches at the periphery of Jakarta.
Marina Peterson, who besides her interest in airport noise as amplifying the indefinite urbanism of Los Angeles has been exploring how experimental forms of writing and sound recording can probe into difficult-to-grasp atmospheric phenomena. She is codirector of the Bureau for Experimental Ethnography at UT Austin, which organizes events and through a series of online meetings: recorded, later transcribed. A selection of these conversations formed the basis of the chapter, subject to a few rounds of rewritting.
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Our conversations took place online: recorded, then transcribed. A selection of them formed the backbone of the first manuscript of the chapter, later reworked several times. In sharing fragments of our choral and virtual kitchen- like exchanges, we aim to further the book’s concern with collaborations and engagements, discussing the ‘more- than- textual’ transformations of ethnography. As we see it, this entails: (i) learning to appreciate collaborative experiments, projects and engagements – hence, opening up to the multivocality of the places we do research in, the plurality of ways of thinking, doing, telling and conceptualizing already present in the lives of our epistemic partners, from which we could re- learn and re- imagine our practice; and (ii) discussing the challenges of doing multimodal ethnographic projects today – the hopes and wishes, but also the problems or the predicaments encountered when exploring ethnography’s different means and modes of storytelling and doing abstraction. All in all, this was a very enjoyable process. We hope the result is also interesting for you, reader!
Ethnographies: In the kitchen of ‘more than textual’ ethnography
Throughout the last century, ethnography has come to stand as anthropology’s main empirical approach. Over this period, ethnography has developed into a particular mode of enquiry, partaking in and learning from the worlds and lives of people and other beings. This chapter aims to explore the challenges and possibilities of ‘more- than- textual’ approaches, paying particular attention to our own collaborative experiments as well as those of others who inspired us or with whom we have been in conversation. In reflecting about their challenges, we aim to foreground the ‘adventure of relevance’ that contemporary explorations in jointly crafting
research objects and conditions of contemporary anthropological enquiry might entail. We will discuss how contemporary ethnographic works have not simply expanded beyond the graphic but have affected our approaches and our objects of study, also refiguring how and what we take the object of anthropology to be, well beyond ethnos. Indeed, going beyond functionalist, structuralist or cultural–interpretivist approaches, some colleagues have started foregrounding multi- species or more- than- human or environmental concerns, engaging with hard-to-grasp atmospheric phenomena. What we find so intriguing about these experimental openings of the ‘more- than- textual’ is that they force us to consider the following questions: What is ethnography today? And, even more importantly, what could it become?
How to quote: Criado, T.S., Peterson, M., Prabaharyaka, I., Sopranzetti, C. & Suárez, M. (2025). Ethnographies: In the kitchen of ‘more than textual’ ethnography. In J. Tošić, S. Strasser & A. Lems (Eds.) Re-turns, Entanglements and Collaborations: Anthropological Experimentations (pp. 281-309). New York: Berghahn | PDF
Von Ethnolog:innen wird heute erwartet, dass sie sich zu aktuellen sozialen Problemen und Debatten positionieren. Dieser Reader bietet erstmals einen Überblick über die vielfältigen Praktiken, Formate und Ansätze, mit denen das Vorhaben der »Public Anthropology« an Instituten der ethnologischen Fächer in Deutschland heute umgesetzt wird. In fünf Sektionen – Öffentlichkeiten, Kollaborationen, Positionierungen, Transformationen und Vermittlung – diskutieren Autor:innen verschiedener Karrierestufen praxisnahe Beispiele für öffentlich-ethnologisches Arbeiten. Sie machen sowohl die wissenschaftlichen und gesellschaftlichen Zugewinne der Public Anthropology als auch die damit verbundenen Herausforderungen sichtbar. Mit seinen fundierten konzeptuellen Rahmungen vermittelt der Reader Studierenden und Forschenden der ethnologischen Fächer wertvolles Hintergrundwissen zu (inter)nationalen Debatten im Feld der Public Anthropology. Gleichzeitig stellt er wichtige Ressourcen für das praktische Arbeiten in diesem Bereich bereit. Damit bietet er auch Anregungen für Wissenschaftler:innen und Studierende benachbarter Disziplinen ebenso wie gesellschaftliche Akteur:innen, die Interesse an Public Science haben.
Together with Judith Albrecht, Ignacio Farías, Andrew Gilbert, Carla J. Maier and Nasima Selim we publish a manifesto for multimodal work in Public Anthropology:
Multimodales Arbeiten in der Public Anthropology – A Map of Interventions und kein Territorium. Ein Manifest
Judith Albrecht, Tomás Criado, Ignacio Farías, Andrew Gilbert, Carla J. Maier & Nasima Selim
Abstract: Das Manifest betont das transformative Potenzial multimodaler Forschung in der Public An thro po logy und fordert eine institutionalisierte Evaluierung multimodaler Projekte. Multimodale Arbeiten wie Filme, Games, Graphic Novels und Ausstellungen ermöglichen durch ihre multisensorischen und kollaborativen Ansätz vielschichtigere Zugänge zu komplexen gesellschaftlichen und kulturellen Zusammenhängen als rein textbasierte Arbeiten. Das Manifest präsentiert Ergebnisse des Forschungsprojekts »Multimodal Appreciation«, darunter ein Toolkit zur Bewertung multimodaler Projekte. Anstatt sich als eine weitere Subdisziplin zu positionieren, wird multimodales Arbeiten in der Public An thro po logy als grundlegende Haltung gesehen, die Theorie, Praxis und gesellschaftliche Relevanz mit der Entwicklung neuer Evaluationskriterien und -praktiken, Publikationsformate und Öffentlichkeiten konsequent zusammendenkt.
Keywords: Multimodal; Evaluation; multisensorisch; multimedial; kollaborativ; Public Anthropology
The book features the work of many researchers who have been for a very long time a great inspiration to think of care and care practices in STS and beyond. As the editors position the book, this is:
An original essay collection that explores the generative dimensions of fragility, which can help reveal new life-affirming politics and ethics.
At a time when it may be easy to fall into a defeatist melancholia, if not outright pessimism, fragility offers an opportunity for a different kind of world-making. In Fragilities, Fernando Domínguez Rubio, Jérôme Denis, and David Pontille argue that we need to pay attention to the moments when the bodies, things, and worlds we inhabit begin to crack and reveal their fragility; it is in these instabilities that we can gain precious access to alternative ways of being. The essays in this collection explore how the work of care, maintenance, and repair compose with, rather than struggle against, fragilities.
Fragility forces us to reckon with the precariousness and contingency of life and to use this reckoning as a starting point to build and nurture life-affirming politics and ethics. The book explores fragility in four categories—bodies, environments, labor, and politics—and proposes to consider in each situation what/who is rendered visible, what/who is made absent, what is considered normal, and what is deemed strong and stable versus what is deemed fragile. The volume includes a strong line-up of leading and emerging scholars from a wide array of disciplines, including anthropology, social studies of science, disabilities studies, and sociology.
As the editors powerfully discuss in the conclusions, ‘fragility’ might operate less as a closed analytic and more as a ‘sensitising device’, a provocation of whose effects we need to take care of when deploying it in our analyses:
“No object or living being is fragile in itself. What matters is when, why, and by whom it is considered and treated as fragile: through which mode of attention, by which gestures and instruments, according to which collectives, in which situation, and among which interdependencies.” (p. 253)
“Resisting reductionism and cultivating discomfort are two crucial perceptual, affective, and conceptual operations that thinking with fragility helps to carry out. Thus, as a situated, relational, and ambiguous concept, fragility allows us to “stay with the trouble” …It is as much sensitizing and provocative as it is troubling. This dimension of what fragility does is particularly important when the concept is associated with repair, maintenance, and care, as it is in this collection. There is, indeed, a serious risk of romanticizing these practices as if they were intrinsically good and fair … care needs to be unsettled in order to escape reification and conservatism” (p.259)
“As troubling as it may be, thinking with fragility does not lead to paralysis or infinite oscillations. On the contrary, it unfolds the present and its openness and allows us to connect aspects of the past with possible futures that call for action.” (p.260)
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The book has just appeared not just as a paperback but, as a fully open access e-book, downloadable here.
Thanks for putting this together Fernando, Jerôme and David, what a treat!
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Our contribution, written at the height of the pandemic, reflected on our fieldwork projects: Vincent’s on MOS@N, a mobile health (mHealth) initiative implemented in Nouna, rural Burkina Faso, and myself’s on the do- it- yourself (DIY) collective En torno a la silla in Barcelona, Spain. Here you have it.
Care in Fragments: Ecologies of Support Beyond Repair
Writing almost two years into a global pandemic response gone wild (ripe with vaccine colonialism, securitarian nationalism, and blatantly unequal exposure to the virus), with public infrastructures in shambles, amid the splintering effects of decades of neoliberal policies and centuries- long settler and white supremacist vio lence, it seems pretty safe to suggest that care is falling to pieces. Care, a series of practices by which life is supported and made to thrive, is in fragments. When dealing with such a state of affairs, care thinking can become complicit with a tendency to subsume care, and indeed the organization of collective life, under a project of repair understood narrowly as a mere recovery of lost function.
But what if taking care beyond repair entailed attending to fragmented lives without any hope of return to a lost unity or to a retrieved “normality”? Even in fragments, care demands to be defended— perhaps, even, especially in fragments. The often disempowering or weakening effects of fragmentation are well documented. In this chapter, however, we examine how fragmentation may also give rise to, intensify, and pluralize the relations that hold and support lives— precariously composing what we call “ecologies of support”. By exploring fragments and their afterlives, we aim to contribute to thinking about fragility not merely in the negative form of a loss, as the notions of ruins, degradation, or decay tend to pose. Rather than drawing from the reparative and restorative approaches that often haunt maintenance and repair studies, this chapter focuses on the endurance of fragments and how they may multiply and unfold in unexpected ways.
[ES] El urbanismo de la modernidad puso al Sol en el centro. Pero los peligros de su exposición excesiva, agravados por la crisis climática, exigen repensar la arquitectura y el espacio público desde la sombra.
[CAT] L’urbanisme de la modernitat va posar el Sol al centre. Però els perills d’exposar-s’hi excessivament, agreujats per la crisi climàtica, imposen repensar l’arquitectura i l’espai públic des de l’ombra.
[EN] The urban architecture of modernity placed the Sun centre stage. But the dangers of over-exposure to the Sun’s rays, aggravated by the climate crisis, are forcing us to rethink public spaces and architecture from the perspective of shade.
