This paper focuses on techniques to grasp material context in its relation to symbolic and social orders by combining qualitative and quantitative methods of social research. Departing from Latour’s ANT and Knorr Cetina’s object-centered sociality, we seek to relate social and meaning structures to everyday material context. In doing so, we study artistic collectives, for which the role of space and materiality has been widely recognized (Carlozzi et al. 1995; Meusburger 2009; Griswold et al. 2013), as artists are particularly responsive to stimuli from material environment. Few studies aimed to empirically tackle the relations between the symbolic world of artistic creation and the material world of objects normally use ethnographic observation, interviews and photo elicitation. Supplementing those with quantitative methods, such as formal textual analysis and sociometric surveys, we attempt to trace patterns in how objects are used and narrated applying a set of techniques to map and triangulate relations b