Students from the National University of Arts (UNA) staged a flash mob at the main hall of the busy Once train station in Buenos Aires on Wednesday to protest against President Javier Milei’s university funding veto.
Dozens of young people danced to Lali Espósito’s Fanático, after which they unfolded a flag that read UNA Movement Resists and started chanting in favor of public higher education and against the Milei administration’s defunding of public universities.
The flash mob’s musical choice was not a coincidence: the pop star’s latest hit has been interpreted as a stab against the Argentine president, who has had a public quarrel with Espósito earlier this year, accusing the singer of cashing in tax-payer money acquired through cushy state contracts to perform at public festivals around the country.
The Fanatico video clip shows Espósito holding a casting call and watching various hopefuls take the stage, including an actor with Milei’s characteristic sideburns, violently screaming while throwing away money.
Videos of the protest went viral on social media, prompting a response from Espósito on X, who replied with a heart emoji and later posted: “What a thrill”.
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On Thursday, the dean of the university María Marta Gigena told C5N the flashmob was planned by the entire UNA community. “We came up with the chance to make this spontaneous flash mob. It was super-choreographed and planned, of course, but a surprise in a public area,” she said.
Gigena said the situation of UNA was “as problematic as the rest of the [university] system,” with the added complexity that “more than half of our buildings are rentals.”
According to her, there was a building in construction in La Boca for UNA that was two months away from inauguration. “But when all public construction was halted in December, so was this one. So we are still paying rent, which is a shame and a poor use of resources. It’s actually a policy that goes even against the ideas of this very administration,” she added.
“I’ve worked in UNA for 23 years, and I’ve been the dean for the past eight. This is the worst time the university has experienced because the budget and wage-round situations are tremendously cruel, but also because it’s the worst time in terms of ideological and intellectual attacks against these kinds of spaces.”