Event details
Wednesday, May 22, 2024
6:30 pm

Dia Chelsea
537 West 22nd Street
New York, New York

Free. Spaces are limited; registration opens Wednesday, May 8.

Join us for a lecture by curator and writer Camila Marambio as she reflects on Morelos’s exhibition in relation to her own practice at the intersection of environmental humanities, decolonial nature conservation, contemporary art, and performance studies, with a particular focus on her research and conservation efforts of peatlands and coastal wetland ecosystems. For Dia’s forthcoming publication dedicated to Morelos’s soil-based works, Marambio and ecologist Renee Rossini contributed a text on peat, which is a revered material for the artist in this commission. The lecture is accompanied by a scent invocation and textual contribution by artist agustine zegers, inviting peatlands from various corners of the world into the space.

Camila Marambio is a transdisciplinary curator, storyteller, and somatic care worker. Marambio earned an MA in Modern and Contemporary Art: Critical and Curatorial Studies from Columbia University, New York, in 2004; an MA of Experiments in Arts and Politics from Sciences Po, Paris, in 2012; and a PhD in Curatorial Practice from Monash University, Melbourne, in 2019. In 2010, in partnership with the Wildlife Conservation Society Chile, she founded Ensayos, a collective research practice dedicated to long-term, process-based projects focused on ecocultural conservation work in Karokynká, Tierra del Fuego, Chile, and other archipelagos. In 2020, she was a guest curator of the Extended Research Project at the Cisneros Institute of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, during which she convened the Aconcagua Summit. In 2021, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm as part of The Seedbox: An Environmental Humanities Collaboratory. In 2022, for the Chilean Pavilion at the 59th Venice Art Biennale, she curated the collective and interdisciplinary project Turba Tol Hol-Hol Tol, which includes an eponymous book of ecotransfeminist writing from Latin America and the Caribbean. Marambio’s writing has been published in Art+Australia, Australian Feminist Studies, Discipline, Kerb Journal, Terremoto, The River Rail, and Third Text, among others. She has co-authored Slow Down Fast, A Toda Raja (2019) with Cecilia Vicuña, and Sandcastles: A Queerfemme Proposition on Cancer Ecologies (2024) with Nina Lykke. Currently, Marambio is Curator of New Perspectives at the conservation NGO Para La Naturaleza in Borikén, Puerto Rico.

About the program series 
In conjunction with Delcy Morelos: El abrazo, Dia presents Soil Sessions, an iterative series of interdisciplinary activations, poetic responses to, discursive reflections on, and embodied engagements with earth as subject and material in Morelos’s work. These public programs, presented monthly throughout the run of the exhibition, invite sustained engagement with the commission through a variety of lenses.

More information on the full program series is available here.