ENSAYOS Listening Series Ensayos

Episode four, Phase Transitions, is set in Hartford, Connecticut and was created with fine art graduate students from the Nomad MFA, an interdisciplinary master of fine arts program dedicated to regenerative culture hosted by the University of Hartford. This episode was produced during a course taught by Ensayistas Camila Marambio and Christy Gast who asked the students (Julie Chen, Arnetha Douglas, Kathryn Cooke Katie Grove, Aiyesha Ghani, Roberta Trentin, Monica Kapoor, and Mauricio Vargas) to think “with” water as they developed segments on phase transitions. Artists in this program live all over the world. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, they could not meet in person or access professional recording studios so they recorded with their phones and digital recorders. The bumps and glitches of recording are artifacts of the learning process, and also of the imperfect time in which we are living and working. Catalina Jaramillo hosts the episode.

Episode three is set in the Americas — in Chile and in New York. In this episode we think with wetlands. We squish through them — in real life and in our imaginations. We experiment with lending each other our ears and our voices to create a chorus — many forms of naming the things that we love and care for. Hema’ny Molina, a poet who is president of the Selk’nam Corporation Chile. The Selk’nam people are one of four communities Indigenous to Tierra del Fuego. Hema’ny shares her manifesto about caring for peat bogs as a form of cultural resistance. Christy Gast, an artist who lives on a wetland in New York state, wonders how field-based research can happen at home in the time of COVID. Dr. Bárbara Saavedra is the director of the Wildlife Conservation Society in Chile, advocates for peatland conservation, and has created a road map for how Chile should do this. Camila Marambio, who founded Ensayos, takes us on a guided tour of the olfactory system, and Fuente Papudo performs a tune based on a Chilote folk song. Catalina Jaramillo hosts the episode. 

Episode two is set in Norway and begins in the frozen Arctic. Artist Karolin Tampere has created “A glaciorhythmic audio collage” from the sounds she captured during an artist residency on the island of Spitsbergen. Artist Randi Nygård shares thought-experiment on Norway’s marine resources act, which states that “The wild living marine resources belong to society as a whole in Norway.”  Artists Søssa Jørgensen and Geir Tore Holm share a playful manifesto about caring for a creek on their farm outside of Oslo, and a binaural audio collage documenting their 11-day boat journey above the Arctic Circle. The episode closes with "Kings of the Rivers," a song about farmed sea salmon that was written by a group of artists who were part of the Sørfinnset Skole artists-at-sea-residency in 2016. Christy Gast and Karolin Tampere perform the song. Catalina Jaramillo is the host.

This episode guides listeners on the migration path of the mysterious short-finned eel from freshwater to sea. Beginning inland at the urban Merri Merri Creek, artist and educator, Sarita Gálvez, offers a lesson on acknowledgment and water care. Thousands of miles north, indigenous scholar, Dr. C.F. Black narrates her speculative mystery “The Bringers of the Viral Red Dust” and Ensayos enacts a somatic exercise in “Mangrove Tuning” at the edge of a coastal wetland.  Returning to the eel’s breeding ground in the Coral Sea, marine biologist, Dr. Lynne Van Herwerden, offers a sorrowful interview about a tiny crustacean and microplastics. The episode ends with a song about the imperiled copepod. Catalina Jaramillo is our host.