Paper short abstract:

What happens if an anthropologist invites ten artists to engage with an ordinary object and revise it into a political question? What kind of reactions and dynamics does this gesture open along? And how does anthropology relate to its own failures, limits and changing notions of fieldwork?

Paper long abstract:

What happens if an anthropologist invites ten artists to engage with an ordinary object and revise it into a political question? What kind of reactions and dynamics does this gesture open along? And how does anthropology relate to its own failures, limits and fieldwork accidents?

This paper sets out to demonstrate the way these three questions are interrelated by describing the making of the exhibition 'Objects of Attention' (Estonian Museum of Applied Art and Design, 2019), in which 31 people with different background took part. The ethnography describes how an anthropologist makes use of things as devices of social research, acts himself as a curator, and establishes experimental collaborations (Estalella and Sánchez Criado 2018). A key challenge of this project was to be aware of different standards, disciplinary interests and temporal regimes between the diverse practitioners involved. Another key challenge was to create its own audience across disciplinary boundaries and at the intersection of different fields of study.

By reconsidering the failures and shortcomings of the ethnographer in both, the paper engages with methodological self-assessment and disciplinary notions of fieldsite and epistemic validity. Also, it reflects on what to do when the ethnographer loses trust in the informants or they misbehave, cheat, go missing, or fail to keep the engagement: can we still consider them as informants? And does it stop fieldwork?