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Paper short abstract:

I reflect on Collective Exploration Workshops (CEWs) and Emotional Editing as two ethnographic inventions which emerged as methodological strategies to cope with the predicament of ethnography in the intimate space.

Paper long abstract:

How to study intimacy without destroying it? This question hunted me from the start of a long research project on intimacy-making in three world cities (Madrid, Montevideo, and Mexico). Results are contained in the monography Metropolitan Intimacies (2022) and the film The Order I Live In (2018).

Recognizing singularity and minimizing intrusion were our guidelines. In a first stage, we organized collaborative workshops at a cultural lab in Madrid, on a voluntary basis. Groups among 5 and 20 participants talked and interacted for two or three hours around a suggested activity like bringing personal photos, preparing a meal, sketching a map of home appliances, compiling a music repertoire, dancing, storytelling, drawing. We called that “Collective Exploration Workshops” (CEWs). The task at hand confers a common goal, prompting a lively exchange of experiences and confidences. We laughed and cryed together in some of these sessions.

The experience was so moving that in a second step we visited some of these people in their homes. The material was edited in the form of an indoor urban symphony which weaves voices in a choral line. We called it Emotional Editing: the emotional tone provides the thread between the sequences, and the montage reflexively integrates the author’s voices in the form of music soundtrack -composed by myself- and visual athmospheres -filmed by Jorge Moreno. Emotional editing follows emotional, sensorial, and poetic principles: the poetics of the participant’s stories are replicated at a textual level, in the very making of visual, affective, and sensory discourse.