Agenda

“Learning With” Workshop Series
On Instrumentality and Sylvia Wynter's "Black Metamorphosis”

22 May 2026 | 9:00 - 13:00
Aula Biral, Malcanton Marcorà - Venice

Jonas Tinius in dialogue with Antonia Majaca Friedman and Roberta Raffaetà DFBC, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice

This workshop explores what a minor curatorial anthropology can contribute to collaborative research in precarious socio-ecological contexts. Jonas Tinius's work has examined how curatorial practice can function as a methodological device within anthropology—as an infrastructural practice that shapes what can be known, said, and collectively negotiated. In Awkward Archives (2022, with Margareta von Oswald), he proposed the notion of the ethnographic draft as a form that does not stabilise knowledge but re-activates relations, allowing difficult historical materials to remain open to reinterpretation and contestation.

This workshop brings that work into dialogue with the methodological problems Antonia Majaca and Roberta Raffaetà have been working through: how counternarratives to dominant technoscience are constructed within complex political ecologies; how metabolic relations figure in research on health across difference; and what happens when the archive is not textual or visual but ecological—from contaminated soil samples and species inventories shaped by colonial taxonomies, to oral histories of environmental change and the situated expertise of Indigenous scientists, farmers, and environmental researchers. In such contexts, curatorial method runs into forms of epistemic accountability that natural science, activist politics, and place-based knowledge claims each structure differently, and which cannot easily be resolved into representational outputs.

The workshop asks what a joint methodological reflection might produce when these research traditions are made to work on the same problem. Curatorial anthropology may offer formats for staging epistemic frictions productively, by way of protocols, assemblies, experimental publics, and pedagogical modules, in order to design situations in which heterogeneous knowledge practices can encounter one another without premature synthesis. The question driving the workshop is therefore not only methodological but prefigurative: how do curatorial infrastructures shape conditions of articulation, negotiation, and imagination in contexts marked simultaneously by urgency, asymmetry, and uncertainty?

Jonas Tinius is Director of the Berlin-Brandenburg Office for Everyday Culture and responsible for the archives and collections of the Institute for European Ethnology at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He is Secretary of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) and co-convenor of the EASA network colleex—collaboratory for ethnographic experimentation. Together with Margareta von Oswald, he co-edited Awkward Archives: Ethnographic Drafts for a Modular Curriculum (2022, Archive Books) and Across Anthropology: Troubling Colonial Legacies, Museums, and the Curatorial (2020, Leuven University Press).

"Learning With" is an experimental workshop series and the primary methodology of the Radical Epistemologies cluster at NICHE.

Registration: antonia.friedman@unive.it