Margarita Torrijos is an artist who works with collaborative research in close relation to territories and the people living in them. She is engaged in a critical discourse around social infrastructures in activist strategies, natural resources and rights to land.Here, she facilitates spaces for critical and collective learning, focusing on the creation of counternarratives, that can bring forth reflection and action through artistic processes.
Currently a PhD in artistic research fellow at Trondheim Academy of Fine Art, Margarita is engaging specifically into methods of collective filmmaking, telecommunication, critical pedagogy and activism around climate justice – especially on the theme of “green” energy transition in Norway and Chile.
Margarita Torrijos is a Chilean-Danish artist, MFA from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (2015). She has co-written the book “The City in the Sandbox- The Development of the City as Social Praxis” together with Kristian Byskov and has developed various collective artistic projects with neighbor communities and grassroots organizations in Chile, UK and Denmark, working with building infrastructures, narrative making and documentary practices.
Plural Cinema – Collective imaginaries in contexts of political struggles around land
Plural Cinema is an artistic research on modes of entangling and bringing closer the relations between ecological struggles and critical pedagogythrough tools of collective film making in contexts of dispossession of land and natural resources. I am studying and developing principles and tools for filmmaking from below, based on critical pedagogical approaches of learningwith non-professionals and sub-alternated communities. My emphasis is on creating spaces of learning where different knowledges convene with non-conventional modes of film production driven by popular culture, artisanal methods and inventive, improvised approaches. A research on counternarrative modes of representation that can lead to fiction-futurities narrative-making of emancipatory potentials on local ecological and political struggles.
This project is linked to the context of the Chilean boom of “renewable” energy infrastructure investments, increased over the last years. Chile’s richness of natural resources as well as its neoliberal law system, welcomes transnational companies to engage in the extraction and building of infrastructures, that with almost no exception, is generating irreversible damages to ecosystems and communities. Linking cases in Norway and Chile, this project also intends to establish networks of telecommunication and solidarity between groups that work with audiovisual narratives and critique around these issues in distant contexts with shared experiences in peripheral Norway and Chile.