October 7 | 7:00 p.m.
Free entry until capacity is reached
Within the framework of the exhibition ^misericordia, by the artist Isidro López-Aparicio, a thesis reading is proposed so that the doctoral students, Chantal Maillard and David Escalona, can obtain the doctorate degree from the LAU, the Free University of the Arts which López-Aparicio founded and which, as a section, occupies a place in the La Térmica exhibition. Faced with the standardization of thinking typical of the current educational system, López-Aparicio illuminated the Free University of the Arts (LAU), an alternative proposal to “academic capitalism” in which training develops freely in the forms and times that correspond to its own processes.
This is a committed project, which reveals the perversions of the system, proposes alternative scenarios and, as the artist’s usual positioning, seeks to put pressure on the institution. It is also a project that gives importance to the local and the intimate, and that seeks to escape the bureaucratic limits dictated by the rules of profitability. Thus, in this project we glimpse a critical voice that offers possibilities to correct imperfect situations. Based on this local character, the doctoral students, unquestionable figures of Spanish culture, doctors and university professors (Escalona in office and Maillard left this occupation), are linked to Malaga.
This ideology is manifested through different actions, such as the direction of theses that are not subject to institutional regulations, although all of them have the maximum rigor of higher-level research, but may not observe bureaucratic restrictions. In this scenario, theses are developed and defended that would have no place in the regulated university. In fact, some of the defended theses are presented in this exhibition, which, as can be seen, have as their authors truly transcendental artists of recent decades.
The LAU has created affiliated centers, which has allowed it to reach the margins of society, offering itself as a way of hope and restoration of opportunities. Likewise, the LAU signs framework agreements with other universities that carry out their work in adverse contexts or that are marginal in nature or dedicated to non-hegemonic sectors of the population, such as, among others, the University of Tifariti of Western Sahara, in the fields of Tindouf refugees, or the Intercultural Indigenous University.
Chantal Maillard (Brussels, 1951). He has lived in Malaga since he was twelve years old. In 1969 he adopted Spanish nationality. She has taught at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Malaga, as a professor of Aesthetics and Theory of the Arts. Starting in 1998, he developed critical work in the cultural supplements of ABC and El País, translated Henri Michaux, disseminated Indian thought with various publications and promoted the creation of intercultural philosophy and aesthetics subjects at the UMA. In 2000 his teaching life was suddenly interrupted. In 2004 he was awarded the National Poetry Prize for his work. Kill Plato and in 2007, for Threadsthe Critics’ Prize for Castilian poetry. He has collaborated on interdisciplinary projects with national and international artists, such as David Escalona.
David Escalona (Malaga, 1981). Doctor in Fine Arts from the University of Granada and currently professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts of this university. The years completed in the Bachelor of Medicine at the UMA mark his artistic career, with the body, illness and fragility being themes that underpin his production. “I am not trying to make an apology for the disorder, the pain or the wound. Nor do I try to address disability from Art Therapy. I do not intend to influence art as a healing process, but rather on conflict and contingency as the germ of creation or opening to new possibilities in art and in practically all areas of life,” writes the artist. He has held numerous individual and group exhibitions in different galleries and art centers of recognized national and international prestige (CACMálaga, Conde Duque in Madrid, Instituto Cervantes in New Delhi, ISCP in New York, Künslerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, etc.).