Margarita Torrijos is a Chilean-Danish artist, PhD candidate in Artistic Research at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, MFA from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (2015), who works with collaborative research in close relation with places and the people living and working in them. She is engaged in a critical discourse around social infrastructures in activist strategies, environmental care 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.

She is a creative associate at the organisation Ways of Working in Wales. Margarita has co-written the book “The City in the Sandbox - The Development of the City as Social Practice” together with Kristian Byskov and has developed various collective artistic projects with neighbour communities and grassroots organizations in Chile, UK and Denmark, working with building infrastructures, narrative making and documentary practices.

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Plural Cinema – Collective imaginaries in land-struggle contexts is an artistic research project on modes of entangling and bringing closer the relations between ecological struggles and critical pedagogy through tools of collective film making in contexts of social struggle, natural resource extraction and dispossession of land. By studying existing and developing new principles and tools for filmmaking from below, based on critical pedagogical approaches of learning, militant cinema and collective research with communities. 

The emphasis is set on creating spaces of learning where different knowledges convene with non-conventional modes of film production driven by slow-pace conversation, artisanal methods and improvised approaches; linking in its process, land worker's relationships with the environment and land struggles with an experimenting film crew. A research on counternarrative modes of representation that can lead to fiction-futurities narrative-making of emancipatory potentials on local social, ecological and political struggles. 

This project aims to deepen our understanding of territorial and temporal relationships with the land, particularly in rural and peripheral areas, by exploring links between women’s approaches to forms of organisation, community activism and artistic strategies, contributing to a broader understanding of social engagement in artistic practices as spaces for learning.

The geographical context of this PhD sits in Chile, where the boom of renewable energy projects, has 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, leans to generate irreversible damages to ecosystems and communities. Taking into consideration the postcolonial local history of development in Chile´s commodifying way of using land as resource for global trade markets, the fracture seen on the surface by green energy projects, is deeply linked to older established extractive practices in the region.