Seeking to this position prevented in preview mode
In this piece APS participates in a demonstration organised by the Asociación de Vecinos sin Vivienda (Association of homeless residents) in the streets of Malaga. The act of demonstrating is theatricalized in the manner of an Easter procession, with all its due paraphernalia: drums, candles, etc. APS' members mix with and dissolve into the crowd of citizens, maintaining the anonymity so characteristic of this artists' collective. In the video, images of the demonstration and of the different participants claiming the right of all citizens to a decent home are combined with APS opinions about professional art and the art market.
From its very first proposals the art action group Agustín Parejo School has presented critical readings about the (in)capacity of the artistic discourse to confront the challenges of everyday politics. They have always opted for working on social issues, especially those affecting their most immediate local context (Malaga, Andalucia). APS has developed a collective process of identity and meaning construction by sharing experiences of social resistance and struggle with those who, like the members of APS themselves, search for ways of establishing their identity as subjects of the city. In this case, the citizens that APS works with, are members of a residents association that demonstrates on a weekly basis, every wednesday, demanding that their right to a decent home be respected (we should keep in mind the context of the costa del sol and the high urban speculation that characterises this area).
APS shows extreme awareness of the relevance of the function of communication, visibility and symbolic production in contemporary media societies, as well as of the effects of the crisis of representation given in democracy's operation today, such as the generation of new and different ways of carrying out political demonstrations. They therefore help afford a greater visibility to the practices of resistance of a collective with a lesser access to the media, by introducing ironic and amusing luring elements into the mis-en-scene, such as the props typical of religious processions. This is a peculiar characteristic of their performance, which is linked to other strategies of theatricalization of the public space as a form of political struggle, such as the caceroladas (banging on cooking pots), the madres de mayo (May mothers in Argentina), etc. It is worth pointing out that all of the members of the residents association did in the end get a home.
In the video there is a mix of slogans such as "Mayor, where are you? The poor can't see you" and "Yes to homes, No to shacks", and banners claiming "Nous sommes tous Agustín Parejo School". APS members meanwhile scream out resounding phrases such as "Malaga, paradigm of africanism" and "End the artist's profession", which testify to this art collective's opposition to the art of talent.
The piece includes a version of the music video for the track Ojú que caló from the album Hirnos de Andalucía (Matasellos, 1987) by La Peña Wagneriana, an Eighties electronic music group from Nerja, Malaga, which disappeared in the Nineties. This song, Ojú que caló, was the programme theme tune of the summer radio programme Discópolis in Spanish National Radio's Radio 3.