Ensayos
Passages
June 14 - September 14, 2020Founded in Karukinka Natural Park, on the Chilean side of Tierra del Fuego—an archipelago renowned for its remoteness, biodiversity, and extreme conditions—Ensayos initially focused on the southern tip of Patagonia. Since then, configurations of its practitioners have explored the extremes of archipelagos on three other continents, including Eastern Australia, Norway, and New York.
Their work on peatlands during the residency seeded founder Camila Marambio’s organization of the Chilean Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale (2022), where Ensayos collaborators and practices were included, as well as the Venice Agreement.
During the residency, Ensayos opened their intimate methodologies to a broader public. Their investigations encompass collective identity, colonial history, multispecies communication, Aboriginal law, and care ethics in relation to wetlands, seas, and coastlines. The New Museum program emphasized how storytelling can foster connections across remote geographies.
Commissions
Cucú and Her Fishes
2020, Video, color, sound; 41:31 min
Ensayistas developed the speculative ecofeminist drama Cucú and Her Fishes, premiering Act I online at the conclusion of their residency. The title and format are inspired by María Irene Fornés’s Fefu and Her Friends (1977).
Hydrofeminist METitations
2020, Sound, three podcasts of varying lengths
Created in Norway, Eastern Australia, Chile, and New York, the podcasts blend journalism, fiction, field recordings, and guided somatic exercises inspired by Astrida Neimanis’s idea that we are “mostly made of water, refusing a separation between nature and culture, between an environment ‘out there’ and a human subject ‘in here.’”
Publications
Essays on Cucú by Una Chauduri and Olivia Michiko Gagnon
“Ensayos Diving Into Oracular Politics”
Selected Programs
Cucú and her Fishes Talk Back and Q&A
Ecofiction at the End of the World
Fortunes of the Forest: Divinations, Dance, and Story
Ensayos founder, curator Camila Marambio, co-taught the summer teen fellowship focusing on ecofeminist, somatic, and situated creative research on watersheds.
Selected Press
A Planetary Expenditure: An Interview with Ensayos on Learning Across a Distance, Jarret Earnest, Momus, August 6, 2020
El corazón de Ensayos es Trans, Wildlife Conservation Society Chile, August 2020
Ensayos on Ecopolitics & Inaugurating the New Museum’s Online Residency, Something Curated, June 23, 2020
Art of Submersion: What Peatlands Taught Me About Con/Fusion, Camila Marambio, Hyundai Artlab, 2024