Selected work

"The project "Odorant Peatlands" ("Turberas Olorosas" in Spanish) was born as an iteration of a prolonged, entangled, and decentralized engagement with global Peatlands initiated by the collective Ensayos. Ensayos is a collective research practice centered on de-extinction, multispecies dialogues, coastal health, and peatland protection. Initiated on the archipelago of Tierra del Fuego in Chile in 2010, Ensayos (meaning “inquiries”, “essays” or “rehearsals” in English) first focused solely on the ecopolitical issues impacting the Fuegian archipelago and its inhabitants. Now, other archipelagos have come into view, with research “pods” growing in Norway, New York, and Australia.

"The project "Odorant Peatlands" ("Turberas Olorosas" in Spanish) was born as an iteration of a prolonged, entangled, and decentralized engagement with global Peatlands initiated by the collective Ensayos. Ensayos is a collective research practice centered on de-extinction, multispecies dialogues, coastal health, and peatland protection. Initiated on the archipelago of Tierra del Fuego in Chile in 2010, Ensayos (meaning “inquiries”, “essays” or “rehearsals” in English) first focused solely on the ecopolitical issues impacting the Fuegian archipelago and its inhabitants. Now, other archipelagos have come into view, with research “pods” growing in Norway, New York, and Australia.

Odorant Peatlands

Ensayos is a collective research practice centered on multispecies dialogues, coastal health and peatland protection. Initiated on the archipelago of Tierra del Fuego in 2010, Ensayos (meaning “inquiries”, “essays” or “rehearsals” in English) first focused solely on the ecopolitical issues impacting the Fuegian archipelago and its inhabitants–past and present, human and nonhuman. Now, other archipelagos have come into view, with research “pods” growing in Norway, New York and Australia.

Over the years Ensayos has defined itself as an interdisciplinary residency, a transdisciplinary research program, an ecofeminist collective, a public health service, and a curatorial exercise. Ensayos has always been focused on process more than on outcome, although along the way it has produced in exhibitions, films, performances, scientific experiments, publications, theatre, a web series, and even perfumes, combining knowledge and work methods in a way that transcends disciplines. In all of its forms, Ensayos insists on the regenerative potential of open-ended, undisciplined, creative research that carefully assembles independent researchers with indigenous communities, local organizations, institutions, governing bodies, and more-than-human entities.

All of Ensayos’ work is documented here

Signed during a historic assembly on June 2, 2022, The Venice Agreement represents a commitment by peatland custodians from around the world to change the trajectory of the ecological and cultural management of these wetland ecosystems towards effective conservation. By taking a bottom-up approach that recognizes local initiatives as key collaborators in the international process of peatland conservation, The Venice Agreement sets a new standard for the valuation and practice of protecting and restoring our planet’s peatlands at the local level.

Developed during a two-day meeting at TBA 21’s Ocean Space, The Venice Agreement was born from the transdisciplinary work of Ensayos and WCS-Chile, supported by the Greifswald Mire Centre. Camila Marambio of Ensayos curated the project and was supported in design and organization by Bárbara Saavedra, Nicole Püschel, and Antonieta Eguren of WCS-Chile, with Susanne Abel and Jan Peters participating from the Succow Foundation / Greifswald Mire Centre. The first sparks for the Agreement appeared one year ago, during the second Bi-national Peatland Seminar between Chile and Argentina, which gave rise to the Patagonian Peatland Initiative and to the curatorial project Turba Tol.

Bi-national Peatland Seminar The Venice Agreement The Venice Agreement at Turba Tol

Turba Tol Hol-Hol Tol is the name of the project that represented Chile at the 59th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale 2022, organized by Chile’s Ministry of Culture, Arts, and Heritage and Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Curated by Camila Marambio the project consisted of a residency, a series of talks, a pavilion created by Ariel Bustamante, Carla Macchiavello, Dominga Sotomayor, Alfredo Thiermann, with the cultural production of Juan Pablo Vergara and a book edited by CM2. For a complete list of the collaborations of the multidisciplinary team of creatives and institutions (Hach Saye, Wildlife Conservation Society - Chile, Ensayos, Greifswald Mire Centre).

Turba Tol Hol-Hol Tol

Transit in the house of cancer is part of El Caldo. The House of Cancer is a building made of words. Assembled from audio archives and unwieldy conversations about cancerous embodiments, each transit through the house gives way to new rooms built by the voices of Camila Marambio, Bárbara Saavedra and Nina Lykke. To transit within the House it is essential to be guided. The artist Ariel Bustamante has taught himself how to listen to the wallwords, to hundreds of hours of inhalations, exhalations, and sighs that live in the cracks of the House. As a guide, he knows how to enter each room, how to exit, how to be with the breathing of others. Recent critical events have provoked Ariel, Camila, Bárbara and Nina to reflect on cancerous interruption through the lens of solitude, marginality, conservation biology, wildfires, autopoiesis, mourning love and celebrating the dead. Their breathing together led them to want to circulate their words back into the world from the underworld. Transit in the House of Cancer stands for healing. The House of Cancer is open(ended).

Transit in the House of Cancer Transit in the House of Cancer Radio Version Transit in the House of Cancer 2 Transit in the House of Cancer at berliner festspiele

A series of events – public outcroppings – including a joint lecture, a movement workshop, a performative reading and a listening experiment, presented by the Royal Institute of Art’s first postdoc fellow, artist, curator and writer Camila Marambio.

During 2021, Camila Marambio was postdoc fellow of The Seedbox: A Mistra Formas Environmental Humanities Collaboratory at Linkoping University, hosted by the Royal Institute of Art. As part of her research and writing process, Camila creates situations for herself and her collaborators from across the globe to discuss, perform and further explore their crossing overs in relation to the study of vitality, mortality, aging, and cancer.

the community garden Royal Institute of Art The Seedbox

The first in a series of conferences for the newly established Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of the Art from Latin America at MoMA. Cumbre Aconcagua (Aconcagua Summit) examined how water has been owned, used, and debated in the Americas through important bodies of work by three women artists: Carolina Caycedo (Colombian), Cecilia Vicuña (Chilean), and Maria Thereza Alves (Brazilian). The conference consisted of three online conversations, or confabulaciones, between the artists and eminent theorists, historians, attorneys, and scientists: Ignacio Valero, Denise Ferreira da Silva, and Marisol de la Cadena. It concluded with an experimental publication called The Water Is the Law which focused on the complexities of the status of the water in Chile.

Watch video Introducing the Cisneros Institute’s Cumbre Aconcagua Part I: Digna Rabia and Moral Hazard Part II: Theft Part II: Theft event Part Three. The Memory of Water event The Water Is the Law

An experimental ecofeminist drama that premiered on September 1, 2020, New Museum, New York. Cucú and Her Fishes (Act 1) was produced by Ensayos and the New Museum, New York, and screened on September 1, 2020 by the New Museum. Directed by Camila Marambio in collaboration with Christy Gast. Set design by Christy Gast with input from cast members. Edited by Christy Gast. Post-production by Darío Ordenes and Camila Marambio. Sound Mix by Ariel Bustamante with collaborations by Christy Gast and Karolin Tampere. Sound Master by Pablo Thierman. Script translation by Manuela Baldovino. Special thanks to Fernanda Olivares Molina, Julian Donas Milstein, Amaara Raheem, Derek Wright, Emily Mello and Andrew An Westover.

Watch video Cúcu and Her Fishes New Museum Medium

A co-authored book with the poet Cecilia Vicuña. Berlin: Errant Bodies Press. “In this brilliant intergenerational dialogue curator Camila Marambio and Cecilia Vicuña, one of the most intriguing Indoamerican artists of our times, converse about mestizaje/miscenegation, ecological disaster, eroticism and decolonization in their multilingual, subversive and irreverent humorous slang.”

Errant Bodies Press book page Printed Matter event announcement

A web series realized and imagined by Camila Marambio and Carolina Saquel, Distancia contemplates life in and with Tierra del Fuego, countering narratives that presume meaning should be found primarily through scientific observation, documentary, ethnographic interpretation, and geographic analysis. Plotless episodes decenter human exceptionalism, weaving suspenseful and quotidian sensations of the sounds and visual textures of the terrain, the wind, and the psychically-charged histories of human architectures. Distancia draws attention to colonial violence written on the land.

DISTANCIA Webseries DISTANCIA at the New Museum

Durational performance in collaboration with the artist Amaara Rahem as part of the survey exhibition “Standard Length of a Miracle (The Bootleg)” by the Swedish duo Goldin+Senneby at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, AU.

Meth(odology) Lab: Making Time IMA Brisbane

This program was presented at West Space in Melbourne as part of Liquid Architecture’s Negative Volumes: Body Languages series. Hydro-feminist meta-tations Inner Ear encompasses exercises, speech objects and uncommon articulations, in a somatic experiment towards a new grammar of listening.

Liquid Architecture Press Release and additional photographic documentation Watch video postscript on Hydro-Feminist METitations

Exhibition of scents, objects, performances, and maps produced through a collaboration with Ensayos members Christy Gast (artist), Derek Corcoran (ecologist), and Giorgia Graells (biologist) at Institute of Art and Olfaction, Los Angeles, CA, an art space that supports artists’ forays into olfactory projects. Collaborative inquiry about how to communicate with the invasive Canadian beavers to be found on the Tierra del Fuego archipelago, so as to include them in the decision-making process about their own endangered future on the islands.

The Institute for Art and Olfaction’s Press Release and additional photographic documentation Ensayos Press Release and documentation