As part of my ethnographic practice, I routinely produce a series of images on the spot – Indian ink lines and watercolours, or digital. I picked this “sketching” habit while doing fieldwork with Jonathan Meese, a renowned painter and performance artist in Germany. “Faster, faster,” he would tell me. Mastering my own style was a major step in my anthropological understanding of his work and of the intricate ways of artistic knowing and making. Since that fieldwork epiphany, I have been taking this new tool to other settings.
Sketching Brains exhibition and book project
Graphic fieldnote from “A day with Prof. Vajkoczy,” one of the series of the Sketching Brains participant exhibition, digital, ©mlc
Producing pictures on the spot requires a longer exposure. Like others, I find these contemplative moments to be highly conducive to ethnographic epiphanies. My drawings are both field notes and lures for telling ethnographic stories.
Graphic fieldnote from an experimental training of medical students in Berlin, indian ink and watercolor, ©mlc
Documentation of VR production with Jonathan Meese (2018)
The use of loose perspective enables me to capture a space as if it was wrapped around the viewer, and to gather micro-scenes and things in my carrier bag to examine later. My pictures also participate in the situations, as they trigger interest and reactions. I’m often told that they convey appropriately the “atmospheres” of the moment. These remarks have fueled my research on ambiances, their particular role in social contexts and the way we can study them in our anthropological practices.
Berlin atmospheres (2017)
