María/Rosario Montero (1978) is a feminist artist-researcher, PhD in Cultural Studies (Goldsmith, UK), MA in Digital Anthropology (UCL, UK) and MA in Visual Arts (U. Chile). She has received grants for artistic production (FONDART) and scholarships for further education (ANID). Her latest publication is “Una línea Marca el Horizonte: Fotografía Contemporánea del paisaje en Chile” (A Line Marks the Horizon: Contemporary Landscape Photography in Chile). Her research addresses how power structures affect representations/perceptions of nature, landscape, identity and territory. Currently, she lives in Santiago, Chile, holds a post-doctoral fellowship at the Aesthetic Institute (PUC Chile) and takes part in the Agencia de Borde art collective.
As a feminist research artist, I am interested in how power structures affect landscape, identity, and territory representations. I approach the topic from a theory-practice perspective, considering thinking, sensing and doing as relevant parts of knowledge production. As such, I work in the liminal space between art and anthropology by the methods used (ethnographic observation, photography and digital media) and the issues addressed. My work challenges the aesthetic value of the visual arts and questions the objectivity of ethnographic representation. My primary tools are my experience of embodying territorialised knowledge and photography. Thus, the photographic apparatus as an object of mediation provides tools that allow the displacement, interpretation and appropriation of the issues worked. Finally, I aim to question the photographic image’s indexical character and its colonial instrumentalisation.