Sketching Brains

»Sketching Brains« is a collaborative exhibition-as-research project which intends to trigger new conversations around the act of sketching in and about neurosurgical practice. Based on a series of fieldwork within the Neurosurgical Department at Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin by graphic ethnographer Maxime Le Calvé and on the research of neurosurgeon and cultural scientist Anna L. Roethe, this initiative takes the form of conversations based on graphic-based stories, presented and continued both onsite and online. In German and English, the texts are comment-enabled to bring the community to react and question the description. The ›participant exhibition‹ becomes a vibrant collaborative forum, choreographed by the ethnographer, to understand more profoundly the implications of neurosurgery in people’s lives, on both sides of the scalpel.

The first series A Day with Prof. Vajkoczy was released last week, both in physical and digital form. The exhibition can be visited on the 6th floor of the Bettenhochhaus in Berlin Mitte —only at the occasion of a medical visit at the moment! The ethnography is pre-published as radical open-access content with comment-able online texts and audioguides on the platform Pubpub. The next series will be published in the coming weeks and months and updated as the research process goes on.