Paper short abstract:

How can drawing help us become ethnographically attentive to changing landscapes? How can drawing activate processes of transdisciplinary investigation requiring a shift towards bodies and matter?

Paper long abstract:

How can drawing help us become ethnographically attentive to changing landscapes? How can drawing activate processes of transdisciplinary investigation requiring a shift towards bodies and matter? These were some of the key questions of the City of Shadows workshop, organized in June 2024 in Barcelona: a workshop to inquire ethnographically on habitability in the face of extreme heat, paying attention to urban shades. We invited participants to explore drawing strategies in guided walks, with the aim of exploring moving shades and attempting to be moved by them. Besides regular ‘stable’ materials, such as pencils, markers, papers of different weights and opacities, we also explored unstable ones: such as anthotypes, a solar printing process using papers emulsified with spinach producing unstable images affording environmental affectivity to the shades of infrastructure, vegetation, and random objects. In doing this, drawing became experiential research, and a way of responding to environmental challenges: activating visual sensitivities passing through the body, aesthetic experiences of image-making processes, and a sensible attention to making. Thus moving with shades, we explored them as regions to be inhabited, or already inhabited, drawing becoming a central tool for the affective exploration of forms of living together in times of climate change.