Paper short abstract:

In our research with Haus der Statistik (a civic-led urban development project in Berlin), we work towards producing para-ethnographic effects among public and civic actors via an on-site scenographic device. We argue for commoning processes in multimodal research to be carefully infrastructured.

Paper long abstract:

Haus der Statistik in Berlin is branded as a ‘model project for cooperative commons-oriented urban development’. Social housing, long-term affordable sociocultural spaces and city administration offices are to be planned and developed by a public-civic partnership. This partnership involves a myriad of public and civic actors, each dwelling in disparate worlds held together by not always very well "controlled equivocations" (Viveiros de Castro), thus losing sight of many intended and unintended misunderstandings.

In our research, and by means of an on-site scenographic fieldwork device, we aim to stage this situation as an idiotic ecology of misunderstandings and alternative definitions of the common (Stengers 2005). In designing our staging device, the ‘Zauderbude’, we aim at a twofold alteration of the scenographic: Firstly, ‘Bude’ meaning cabin or booth, the stage is not a public platform (Marrero 2019), but an intimate interior space for ethnographic encounters. Secondly, ‘Zaudern’ means to waver or to hesitate, in the sense of 'not (yet) acting'.

Commoning in multimodal projects needs to be carefully and multimodally infrastructured. The Zauderbude, we claim, works as an infrastructure for producing para-ethnographic effects. In the ‘Zauderbude’, commoning is not the result of a collaborative 'doing', but takes the form of commoning reflections on collaborative worlding.