On November 18, Nomad MFA students launched “Phase Transitions,” episode four of the Ensayos collective’s Hydrofeminist METitations listening series. Episodes one through three were created during Ensayos’s summer 2020 digital residency with the New Museum, while the fourth episode features five acts produced by eight first-year Nomad MFA students.

The listening series is part of Ensayos’s Coastal Curriculum, a radical pedagogy project dedicated to addressing the planet’s waters and caring for the sea and the coastline. Ensayos uses pedagogy to give form to their hydro-cultural practice — through teaching, storytelling, artmaking, and songs. Faculty and Ensayistas Camila Marambio and Christy Gast asked the students to think “with” water as they developed these segments during the Nomad MFA Techno Lab course.

Students in the Nomad MFA live all over the world and travel to locations throughout the Americas for the field-based curriculum dedicated to regenerative culture. This year, due to the coronavirus pandemic, students could not meet in person in the field. This allowed the stories and issues explored in the podcast to come from the locations where they live. While access to professional recording studios was also prohibited, they recorded with their phones and digital recorders. The group considers the bumps and glitches of recording to be artifacts of the learning process, and also of the imperfect time in which we are living and working.

To celebrate the launch of Hydrofeminist METitations Episode 4: Phase Transitions, Christy Gast and Camila Marambio of Ensayos and Nomad MFA students Julie Chen, Kathryn Cooke, Arnethia Douglass, Aiyesha Ghani, Katie Grove, Monica Kapoor, Roberta Trentin, and Mauricio Vargas presented the project through a series of actions and questions. Visit ensayostierradelfuego.net to listen to the episode.

To learn more, visit nomadmfa.org, or attend an upcoming webinar:

  • The Nomad MFA: River Lab as Hyperlocal Curriculum. Presented by faculty member Mary Mattingly on December 16 at 12:00 pm Eastern time.
  • The Nomad MFA: Are You Ready to Apply? Presented by program director Carol Padberg on January 6 at 2:00 pm Eastern time.

Email mfa@hartford.edu to RSVP.