Keywords: Counternarratives, moving images, critical pedagogy, energy transitions, capitalism, social organisation, infrastructures of resistance.
Plural Cinema is an artistic research on modes of entangling and bringing closer the relations between ecological struggles and critical pedagogy through tools of collective film making in contexts of dispossession of land and natural resource extraction. I am studying and developing principles and tools for filmmaking from below, based on critical pedagogical approaches of learning, militant cinema and collective research with 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; linking land workers relationship with the environment and land struggles with an experiemental film crew. 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.
Margarita Torrijos is a Chilean-Danish artist, MFA from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (2015), 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.
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.
Through a reflection of the work of Cine de A Pie (Cinema on Foot) – an invitation to a series of gatherings initiated under this artistic research project, where people engage in a collective, cinematic research around land use and land speculation in the Biobío region, Chile – this presentation expands on the methodology of making learning spaces that weave different forms of knowledge, experiences and emotions through artistic and political actions that counteract what Rita Segato calls the capitalist’s pedagogy of cruelty.
Cine de a Pie engages with landworkers like Buena Cabra, who commit with radical ways of resistance and land resilience with their goat heard, in a region beaten by corporate tree plantations and a persistent threat of wildfires.
I will also introduce the work of activist organizations from Penco and Lirquén, two adyacent towns in the same region, who last year inaugurated Parque para Penco, a civic forest park, as a result of years of activist effort and policy making that counteracted the threats of the installation of a rare earth mining operation and the drought effects of corporate tree plantations. Sadly, the two towns and the park got recently burned by a devastating wildfire. Evidence points to the intentionalilty of this fire, so the corporation can change the legal status of soil use and make it extractable.
In Cine de a Pie, processing the feeling of being close to the fire opens up a space of collective research and learning that seeks something different. Inspired by militant cinema, slow processes, caring pedagogical approaches in conversation with rural workers which values and resilient ways of working are often forgotten, due the urgencies activists often need to take in order to “estinguish fires”.
In this first presentation, I will introduce the context of my research by mapping out the different themes, strategies, references and considerations I am working with. The focus will be on how the field of film approaches narrative making through collective methods. Here, I am especially interested in how these methods can interact with a process of learning as well as activist strategies.