La diffrazione dell'etnografia nell'era dell'Antropocene: il caso di Westhafen, Berlino

None of the layers of a city port, the geological, the anthropic, the historical, the watery and the botanically relevant, visible and invisible, can be studied alone. No materiality is autonomous from the others, not the goods, not the water, not the subjects, not the habitats. No network can be explained without considering them all. No part of the story can be told referring only to its historical time; in an Anthropocene perspective everything takes place diachronically and in the present. This inextricable overlap can not be studied without being there, without the spoken voice that materializes/matters the concept and the symbolic at the same time. The diffracted ethnography of the Anthropocene consists in this, in following without resisting such fragmentations and stratifications, including in the ethnography of the subjects also the objects, the machines, the plants and the water, and in the continuous and always incomplete process of the re-composition, looking at the same time from near and from afar, through a network of networks.