Contact
Areas of expertise
Biography
The focus of my academic interests are topics in psychology, philosophical hermeneutics, and art from the 19th-Century onwards. I have a certified psychologist from the Universidad del Valle (Colombia, 2004) with a diploma thesis on the Narrative Construction of Identity. I completed a Master of Arts in Philosophy at the Universidad de los Andes (Colombia, 2008) with a master thesis about the Heideggerian Interpretation of the Aristotelian Phrónesis. I successfully defended my PhD dissertation in Art History at the Universität Greifswald (Germany, 2017) with a work on Absence, Time, and the Motif of the Wanderer in the German Art of the 19th-Century. I have teaching experience in philosophy, giving lectures and seminars at different higher education institutions in Bogotá (Colombia), and participated in national and international conferences in Colombia, Argentina, Germany, England, and Finland. Between 2019 and 2021, I have worked in several projects as a postdoctoral researcher at UTU and JYU. In the upcoming years (2021-2023) at UTU, I will be the PI of an interdisciplinary research project titled 'Hermeneutics of Walking', investigating different aspects of walking as motif, practice, and reception strategy in the arts, with special emphasis on Finnish art; this project is funded by the Kone Foundation. Under the artistic name Luca Idrobo, I am also an artistic photographer and writer, working on portraiture and experimental (nature) photography, very often in combination with prose and poetic writings.
Teaching
Currently, I have no teaching responsibilities at UTU. In the past, I have taught lectures and seminars on Hermeneutics, Aesthetics, Aristotelian Ethics, and Pedagogy (Colombia), and worked as well as in supervision and evaluation of bachelor theses.
Research
My current research project 'Hermeneutics of Walking' (2021-2023), funded by the Kone Foundation, investigates the aesthetic experience of walking as motif, artistic practice, and reception strategy in modern arts, with special attention to Finnish artists. It ventures into formal and temporal aspects of walking (posture, speed, rhythm, style) that are supposed to be entangled with cultural and personal memory, identity and belonging, in a wide range of materials like paintings, drawings, photographs, performances and installations. Central to this endeavour is the question about the role that the act of walking plays for the experience and interpretation of artworks and other aspects of spectatorship and research into arts. Special attention will be given to walking experiences in Finnish art from the so-called Golden Age to the present day, which sadly remains relatively unknown or disconnected from the general history of walking art.