Associate professor
Maria Margarita Jimenez is an artist and educator, she leads collective, interdisciplinary projects in collaboration with community leaders and ancestral sabedores and students to create dialogic spaces through practice based artistic research projects that use art and 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. The student group and Nugesi 21 cocreated art-based projects such as graffiti festivals, printed local publications, visual art studio programs for children and youth and live events to visualize local artists. This initiative explored ways to engage students and local leaders through an ethical interaction between academia and communities. 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, neighborhood leaders wanted their story to be told in their own voices, that is why this book based on interviews to the founders an builders of this neighborhood .
She has worked in projects related to Andean heritage in Colombia, in 2017, with the artist Diana Rico, in coalition with Universidad Javeriana, Jiménez organized Mirando al Sur, a week long workshop revitalize the memory of the ancient cultures of the earth and renew awareness of the relationship between spirit and life placing art as a point of origin hosting Carmen Vicente, a medicine woman from Ecuador In 2019, Jiménez worked as a facilitator with a group of students in the process of identification of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of with community members in the town of Mongui, Boyacá Colombia, for the national Heritage and Memory division.
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Research/ semilleros
