MLC - ethnography of the contemporary

I am a multimodal anthropologist working at the intersection of medical technology, design research, and art-science practice. I am a research associate at the Cluster of Excellence "Matters of Activity" at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where I co-lead the project "History and Philosophy of Active Matter". I co-founded and co-direct the Speculative Realities Lab at the Department of Neurosurgery, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin. My research investigates how practitioners in neurosurgery, design, and anthropology relate to computational models, AI technologies, and algorithmic uncertainty. I develop the concepts of aporetic intelligence — productive puzzlement as a transmissible skill — and sketchy logic — the graphic, iterative, and uncertainty-embracing reasoning of surgical and ethnographic practice. As a graphic ethnographer, I use drawing as an investigative and collaborative field method. I also curate exhibitions, virtual reality experiences, and participatory workshops, which I frame as speculative interventions and participant exhibitions.

I trained in general ethnology at Paris Nanterre (BA 2010, MA 2012) and hold a Franco-German PhD in social anthropology and theatre studies from EHESS Paris and FU Berlin (2018, Magna cum laude). Born in Lyon, I have been based in Berlin since 2014. Before pursuing a career in the humanities, I studied economics at IESEG (MSc, Lille, 2005) and freelanced for qualitative research institutes including IPSOS and Rheingold, conducting hundreds of interviews, focus groups, and ethnographic surveys in France and Germany.

My monograph Golden Pudel-Ethnographie (Transcript, 2024) is an ethnography of atmosphere, reputation, and creative resilience in a Hamburg nightclub. A second monograph, Sketching Brains, on graphic ethnography and neurosurgical practice, is in preparation. Two further volumes — Sense-Acts and Ontological Theaters and a multimodal STS exhibition catalogue — are accepted at Berlin Universities Publishing. I have co-edited Exercices d'ambiances (Communications no. 102, 2018), a peer-reviewed volume on atmospheres and ethnographic practice.

I publish fieldwork and research in radical open access through AnthroReverb, an initiative I founded for experimental ethnographic publishing, and through the Speculative Realities Lab documentation site.

From 2021 to 2025 I co-led the project "Cutting" at Matters of Activity, facilitating projects where anthropologists, designers, neurosurgeons, and material scientists collaborated through shared making and thinking. I have held invited researcher positions at the University of Oxford (2023), Concordia University in Montréal (2023), and UC Davis (2025), and have been a collaborator of the EER project (Aarhus University & Olafur Eliasson Studio).

I have co-curated the exhibition projects Field/Works I & II (ANTART/EASA, 2020–2026), Stretching Materialities at the Tieranatomisches Theater Berlin (2021–2022), the participant exhibition Sketching Brains at the Charité (2022–2024), the More-than-human Sketching performance series at the Kunstgewerbemuseum Berlin (2024), the exhibition Curious Ensketchments (2023–2024), and Drift. Sink. Emerge. Repeat. (2025).

I have taught multimodal ethnography, anthropology of techniques, and academic writing across seven course formats at three institutions, including the Institut für Europäische Ethnologie (HU Berlin), the Open Design Master's programme (HU Berlin / Universidad de Buenos Aires), and the Department of Neurosurgery at the Charité, where I continue to give guest lectures and run 3D sketching workshops with medical students. I am developing new courses in AI ethnography and clinical anthropology. My pedagogical approach centres on learning-through-doing, radical open-access publishing of student work, and exhibition-as-pedagogy.

I am also a father to three children and a partner to Chilean doula Ignacia Escobar. Together, we are immersed in contemporary research and practice around birth and early life. I have been practising yoga and meditation daily since 2011, and I integrate contemplative practices into my writing seminars and workshops. Occasionally, I find the time to play the guitar, write a song, or improvise a quick electronic soundtrack for one of my ethnographic videos.

See my CV here: link.

ORCID: 0000-0002-1846-4722

See my CV here: link.