Secundaria y Bachillerato

A box of fanzines published by women, a shelf of books classified by weight or colour, an envelope with tiny publications... A library can be almost anything.
 

Last year, along with Sonia and Andrea, the librarians at CA2M, we started a collaborative project to create an archive of art publications with art students at IES Europa secondary school and to investigate the possibilities for self-publishing. The project consisted in moving the discarded holdings from the CA2M library. Art students took the books, catalogues and fanzines to their classes. Once there, we started a process to construct the shelving for the library and to imagine other possible ways of activating it. However, the project was cut short by the confinement imposed because of COVID-19.
 

This year we propose picking up the project where we left off. To create a strange and unsuspected library based on these and other holdings. Together with the art students, we will rethink what a collective archive actually means and we will question the logic of a library in order to generate a new narrative. The project seeks to develop new possibilities from creativity and resistance, to bring students into closer contact with contemporary creation and to create new bonds of collaboration between departments and institutions.
 

During confinement, we wanted to continue developing this project remotely. To this end, we invited Andrea Galaxina to think of a proposal to send to the students. Taking the form of a tutorial, Andrea prepared this fanzine to think of the creative possibilities of self-publishing.
 

Read Editar con nada. Una pequeña guía práctica (y un poco teórica) para hacer fanzines. (Publish with nothing. A brief practical (and a little theoretical) guide to making fanzines).

Two years ago, with the performing artist Aitana Cordero, we started a performance workshop focused on exploring the intimacy of adolescents within the classroom. We understand that now these relations mean something else and the performance forces us to ask ourselves new questions through action.

For this reason, this year it strikes us as absolutely necessary to continue placing desire at the very core in order to confront this uncertainty of the body that it is our lot to live through and perhaps to thus learn how to breathe better.

From the teachers’ room, the boiler room, the fire escape behind the building, the roof, or from whatever is behind the door at the end of the corridor. This workshop proposes entering those places at school where we have never been before and to reveal them through the camera as undiscovered settings you’ve never seen, or maybe you have, perhaps in a movie.

Now that normality has finally become strange and we know that strange is normal, we want to celebrate it and continue thinking about it from our bodies (mine and others) and try out new ways of being and of being together. To see how we can touch each other without touching and, with the help of art, to infect each other with ideas, with ways of doing, copying each other, imitating what works for our well-being.
 

Now that everything can be different, we will support each other and create chains of queer transmission so that each one of us can be who they want to be and have their own space.
 

Divided into two sessions, this workshop experiments through action and performance.

“At first it seems like a particularly useless act, outlandish and out of the ordinary, but as one discovers that it is a mere manipulation of objects like any other it becomes easy and natural. Looking for barbiturates is like looking for aspirins for a cold and preparing the gas entails the same difficulties as preparing it for a shower.”
 

In 1967 the Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña founded Tribu No and penned the No Manifiesto, a text that proposed not-doing as an action. Starting in the month of March, we will organize a workshop-visit to Seehearing the Enlightened Failure, a retrospective exhibition by the visual artist, poet, filmmaker and activist. Aimed at groups of secondary school students, this activity will engage with the work and strategies of the Chilean artist in order to think and to act through her work.

We invite groups of secondary school students, who wish to jolly in folly, to take part in this workshop-visit which will explore pieces on view in the exhibition Absurd Humour: A Constellation of Folly in Spain, made up of comic artefacts from, among others, Flavita Banana, Francisco de Goya, Chiquito de la Calzada and Gloria Fuertes.

We seriously believe in the importance of laughing hysterically, from the tips of our toenails, taking us to our wits end and going even further until we come out the other side. Jandemorenawer.

Instructions for absurd actions at home:

_ Day 1: At 7:45 pm applaud a member of your family for 3 minutes (PDF)

_ Day 2: Sing a song to a plant (PDF)

_ Day 3: Write an absurd petition on a big piece of paper. Hang the banner out your window and carry out a silent demonstration march at home (PDF)

_ Day 4: Draw your dreams. Give them to someone close by and ask them to interpret them for you (PDF)

_ Day 5: Only use the vowel ‘a’ during lunch. For instance, “pass ma tha salt plaasa” (PDF)

_ Day 6: Silence the television and try to guess what’s being said (PDF)

_ Day 7: Make a list of the food you have eaten over the last 24 hours and put it in the freezer (PDF)