MJimenez

Associate Professor
Art Department
marjimen@uniandes.edu.co

Maria Margarita Jimenez is an artist and educator, she leads collective, interdisciplinary projects in collaboration with community leaders, ancestral sabedores and students to create dialogic spaces through practice based artistic research projects that use, ancestral knowledge and other practices as tools to convene and establish relationships of respect, responsibility and mutual care amongst people and their territory.

From 2018 to 2020 Jiménez lead, an interdisciplinary student based art research project called Arte y Activismo, which implemented participatory art initiatives as a tool for social change. This student group was named Arte y Calle and worked mainly as facilitators with a local grass roots youth organization called Nugesi21 in Ciudad Bolívar in Bogotá. Forthcoming in 2024 is a book about the history of Bella Flor, the specific neighborhood the group worked in Ciudad Bolívar, Bella Flor: una autoconstrucción narrada a muchas manos, distributed by Ediciones Uniandes.

*Leer Mas*

She has worked in projects related to Andean ancestral cultures in Colombia. In 2017, with the artist Diana Rico, in coalition with Universidad Javeriana, Jiménez organized Mirando al Sur, a week long workshop hosting Carmen Vicente, a medicine woman from Ecuador. the aim was to revitalize the memory of the ancient cultures and renew awareness of the relationship between spirit and life placing art as a point of origin. In 2019, Jiménez and a group of students worked as a facilitators to community members of the town of Mongui, Boyacá Colombia in the process of identification of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of the region, this was a National Heritage and Memory Division program.

Jiménez has worked to open spaces for first hand indigenous wisdom in academia, inviting as an ally Elizabeth Trochez, member of the Misak community from Cauca, Colombia. From 2019 to 2022, they implemented a number of strategies -curriculum courses, open workshops and seminars- , based on ancestral ways of knowledge transmission and thought specifically using weaving as a technology for awareness and insight –tejer el pensamiento- and courses to familiarize students with Namtrik language and culture of the Misak community.

As an artist Jiménez organized a collective called Futuros Primitivos (2017-2020), it began as a nomadic band which reorganized itself according to the project. The collective roamed the city of Bogota hunting and gathering waste as raw material for construction, setting up shelters, marking territories, wherever they could or where they were invited, ruins, patios, buildings and forest reserves in mountains. Guided by intuition, measuring the capabilities of the material, they made use of primitive crafts and techniques, such as weaving, and assembling, building according to the material they found and according to the place. Futuros primitivos where originally, Sergio Peláéz, Ileana Vargas, Leyling Juliana Cruz, Angie Jaimes, Violeta Benavides, but projects where often built in public spaces and many people joined spontaneously to weave and unweave.

Since 2020, first with futuros Primitivos, then with Elizabeth Troches and now with artist Alejandra Cubillos, Jiménez has organized sewing activities, she currently organizes sewing circles and events in academia and outside of it as a way to resist a culture of waste and mass production, to resist passive consumption of objects and information, to reclaim time to use our hands on something other than the screen of a mobile phone, to embroider, knit, mend, sew, to connect with intuition more than with discourses. It is a call to reclaim needlework, to celebrate crafts and keep them alive in the intimacy of moments of solitude, in our groups and bring them into academia, this sewing circles are spaces for reconnection, dialogue, learning and active resistance.

Semilleros / Research projects