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Art students at the University of Malta have expressed frustration at being refused studio space in numerous complaints that were sent to the university rector Profs. Roger Ellul Micallef.
“It is not possible to carry out our credits without, not only the respective tools, but an actual space,” B.Ed art students said in their complaints. “The studio is our laboratory. Without a proper space there can be no artistic research.”
Academic staff told this newspaper there were no “adequate facilities” and no storage for students’ work or equipment. Critics told this newspaper the university authorities were dismissing the arts simply as a “bourgeois hobby”.
In a letter sent on 30 November, 2005, students complained that the credits they had to fulfil in their four-year course demanded having an art studio.
Speaking on behalf of the university rector, Prof. Charles J. Farrugia said that the swelling numbers of the student population had made available space a precious community. Asked whether there was an apparent discrimination between the arts and sciences, Farrugia said: “when prioritising, the university thought it was in the country’s interest to invest its limited budget in IT labs for example.”
He was however quick to note that a place for a studio has already been identified and is being considered.
Art students are often obliged to travel from studio to studio, from Msida to Zurrieq or Paola, to follow practical classes at lecturers’ and artists’ private studios. Lecturers have even asked students to work in the university’s corridors due to lack of space.
Students described the situation as “unacceptable by anyone’s standards”.
Dr Carmel Borg and Profs. Dominic Fenech, deans to the faculty of education and art respectively, said that art requires a physical context.
The head of the art unit, Profs. Mario Buhagiar, said that although the unit’s raison d’être remains academic research in the history of art, the few practical elective credits they are proposing “are proving to be very popular indeed. The present financial situation – the university is being run on shoestring budget – does not permit us to have our own studio, at least for the time being. We are making use of a private studio in Mosta.”
Despite the appointment of a full-time coordinator, Raphael Vella, who radically changed the arts course into a multimedia oriented course, the restructured B.Ed. art programme inherited the same problems it had suffered from, namely lack of space.
Joseph Paul Cassar, the former coordinator, said that this is indicative of the university senate’s disregard for the arts. “It is not only a question of a studio, but also a gallery and a museum collection. Every respectable university has a dynamic space where students can establish a relationship with the arts. The library’s regular exhibitions are exemplary in this respect.”
Caeser Attard, who lectures B.Ed students at the Junior College Sixth Form’s art room said the situation depends on policy makers’ perception of the visual arts at university level.
A new studio is currently being set up at the college but logistical problems with the B.Ed. courses remain.
Since the early 80s students taking art credits with Alfred Chircop and Theo Degiorgio used to work in a garage studio, now replaced by the new Gateway Building at the university. Between 1994 and 1996, students taking art lectures borrowed a studio space beneath the library through lecturers’ personal contacts.
Most lecturers confirmed that plans for various studios on campus have been drafted but the project never materialised.
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