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Pierre participated in the AfricaAsia2025 Conference in Dakar, the Lagos Studies Association (LSA) Conference in Lagos, and the Urban Futures Platform at the University of Vienna.

He shared ideas on collapsing buildings and how our lived urban environments are both shaped by and shaping everyday life. He also spoke about house stories and how tracing their transformations over time can reveal a city’s development from the inside out.
Together, these presentations traced the life of urban concrete, always deeply entangled with human lives. In many ways, they are stories about the livability of our cities, told through their histories, their people, and their ecologies.

Photo 1: Pierre Wenzel
Photo 2: Collapsed Building, Ngor, Dakar (2025)

Manuela Ciotti

5th ISA Forum of Sociology 6th – 11th July 2025, Rabat

a roundtable May 2, 2025 @ 10AM EST (7:30PM IST)

This roundtable brought together leading scholars of South Asian art to examine how India’s evolving political landscape is reshaping contemporary art worlds. The discussion has explored how artists, institutions, and publics are negotiating tensions between sacred and secular domains, engaging with state authority, and redefining boundaries between artistic practice, scholarship, and commerce.

Co-sponsors: NYU Anthropology, NYU Center for Media, Culture & History, & NYU The Institute of Fine Arts

Curatorial team: Sanderien Verstappen, Marie-Christine Hartig and Manuela Ciotti

The ANTHROFUTURE Film Festival explores the potential of filmmaking as a research method to investigate experiences of time and temporality, especially people’s orientations towards the future and their practices of future-making in the present. How can people’s relations with the time and the future be investigated? How can they be represented in cinematographic form? The festival showcases attempts to carve out new lives in virtual and material worlds, addressing hopes and dreams as well as protests, violence, and attempts to reconstruct memories. It includes films made by anthropologists, artists, and documentary filmmakers.

The research project Anthrofuture now has its own website. Based at the University of Vienna and funded by the European Research Council, the project is dedicated to developing a decolonized anthropology of the future through multimodal ethnographic research on physical and digital art worlds in the Global South.

The focus includes art schools, art fairs, and digital media platforms to explore new concepts of the future at the intersection of human and non-human, digital and physical.

More information is now available on the website: https://www.anthrofuture.com

During the last edition of the 4^th Vienna Anthropology Days (VANDA), I have presented findings from my doctoral research project Permissible Truths under the title “Who can talk about racism in Germany and how?” as part of the panel “Digital narratives: Exploring digital dimensions of shared experiences and collective memory”.Using the methods of digital anthropology and digital ethnography, I have been following artists documenting and exposing cases of racism in the art world in Berlin on social media, highlighting the exceptionalizing and exclusionary politics and practices in Germany limiting who is permitted to talk about racism and how. The weaponization and politicization of history is particularly targeting migrant artists who resist this dislocation and instrumentalization of “German guilt”. In an era of aggressive silencing, digital and social media provide an alternative platform (albeit with limitations) to tell the stories of struggle, mourning, and racism. For the VANDA presentation, I chose to focus on “memes” and present my work on political humor and the use of mems as a form of digital storytelling.

Below is presented one of the examples, it is an AI generated image that was circulated online in the winter of 2024 following the attack of a racialized group of protesters that were taking part in a large demonstration against the far-right. The group was attacked by the other predominantly white protesters. The demonstration against racism was triggered by the reports that there have been mass gatherings of far-right groups across Germany. Simultaneously, there was a large public outcry caused by the outrageous “Ausländer Raus” [“Foreigners Out”] video scandal.

In response, also have a look at the powerful protest song by Bundaskanzlerin & Vitling here.

This summer has been intellectually stimulating as Pierre had the opportunity to present two papers at the conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) in Barcelona, Spain, and of the European Association for Urban History (EAUH) in Ostrava, Czech Republic.

His first paper, “Dakar in Block: Concrete Diversions,” followed the life of a concrete block in Dakar. This work examined how concrete can shape urban landscapes, lives, aspirations, and identities in cities like Dakar. The second paper, “Cementing Dakar’s Heritage: House Biographies,” took a broader view, questioning the intersection of house stories, heritage, and the temporalities of concrete.

Barcelona and Ostrava provided the perfect settings to think critically about the built environment and the ways we navigate it. Barcelona, with its rich architectural history and contemporary urban dynamics, was an inspiring place for reflecting on the role of materials like concrete in shaping cities. In Ostrava, a city marked by its industrial past, temporality and heritage are questioned fascinatingly.

Now, back in Vienna, with renewed energy for writing and teaching.

Manuela presented her work on art collecting at the TIAMSA Art market conference at the University of Melbourne in July 2024

On February 19, 2021, eighteen days after Myanmar’s military seized power in a coup, a group clad in black dropped a banner from an overpass in Yangon, which had been engulfed in strikes, demonstrations, and blockades after the coup. The banner read: hnaung kyo: hmá t’ba: sone: shone: saya ma’ shi. The slogan is a translation of the phrase from the Communist Manifesto, “Nothing to lose but our chains.” The banner is faithful to the Burmese translation of the Manifesto, which we owe to the Communist Party of Burma (CPB), itself founded in 1939 in the throes of anti-colonial revolution.¹ But meanings can shift in the process of translation, circulation, and (re)interpretation over time. One blogger rightly described the Burmese slogan’s literal meaning as “Nothing to lose but our strings of attachment.”

Aung, Geoffrey Rathgeb. 2024. “A Revolutionary Present”, In “Back to the Present” edited by Timothy P.A. Cooper, Michael Edwards & Nikita Simpson, American Ethnologist website, January 26 2024,

read full article here:

A Revolutionary Present by Geoffrey Rathgeb Aung

Smartphones and construction sites are intertwined in Dakar. This article explores how content on social media shapes the use of concrete in Dakar and our representations of the construction sector. This article is published in Roadsides and is part of a special issue on “Concrete”!

Wenzel, Pierre. 2024. “Shaping Concrete on Social Media in Dakar, Senegal.” Roadsides 11: 70-77.

read full article here: https://doi.org/10.26034/roadsides-202401110