Universidad Popular Session

OFICINA PARALELA Y TRANSITORIA DE OBJETOS PERDIDOS (OPTOP)

E_DLM34 — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 15:24:55 +0000

PARALLEL AND TEMPORARY LOST AND FOUND OFFICE (PTLFO) E_DLM34 Wed, 02/04/2025 - 17:24

PARALLEL AND TEMPORARY LOST AND FOUND OFFICE (PTLFO)

Date: 21 May
Time: 4:30 to 7 pm
Length: 2 1/2 hours
Venue: CA2M Museum
Advance registration via the form starting on 14 May at 6:30 pm

All cities have places that are invisible to the public eye, islands that contain their own landscapes, laws, inhabitants and stories. One of them is the Lost and Found Office, whose records catalogue collections that talk about us: fans, rugs, mirrors, telescopes, ukeleles and hundreds of other items, all assembled there by chance.

What is the story of each of these objects? What is the place housing them like? Who are the invisible agents who work to find and recover them? It is possible to imagine the life of a city and its inhabitants via the things they’ve left in their wake?

In this session, we’ll create a Parallel and Temporary Lost and Found Office. We’ll become its workers. We’ll explore the bounds of the known world through its interstices. We’ll shine a torch on its missing domains.

Participants should bring things from their homes; they can be things used every day or extraordinary things, new or old, real or invented. They will all become part of the PTLFO collection.

Activity guide:

Carolina Arabia was (almost) born on the banks of a river called Caraguatá in the Paraná Delta in Argentina. This may be why she likes magnolia trees, guineafowl, stilt houses, flooded woods and the word sudestada (Southeast windstorm). She taught for many years at a literary workshop for children located in the neighbourhood of Buenos Aires with the most trees. She used to live in Colombia and now lives in Spain, where she also teaches. She won the Finestres Essay Award in 2022. De cantos y animales (Menguantes, 2024) is her first book.

Event type

Universidad Popular Session

Event Date

Wed, 21/05/2025 - 16:30 -Wed, 21/05/2025 - 19:00

Event image

Picture: Ediciones Menguantes

Subtitle

Carolina Arabia

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Límites

E_DLM34 — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 15:21:06 +0000

BORDERS E_DLM34 Wed, 02/04/2025 - 17:21

BORDERS

Date: 14 May
Time: 4:30 to 7:30 pm
Length: 2 hours
Venue: CA2M Museum
Advance registration via the form starting on 7 May at 6:30 pm.

What is a border? The edge of the motorway we drive along, the doorway of our home, the end of the city, the periphery, a time that ends, the threshold separating reality from fiction… Based on this question and its countless answers, we will explore this concept through readings, texts, philosophical ideas, everyday concerns and everything that emerges in the exchange of a conversation.

We will use this dialogue, which will be recorded and turned into a podcast, to question the boundaries of this sound format. Why are we always so attached to a linear concept of time, where things have to have a beginning, a middle and an ending? Can’t the phases be turned around, mixed or transformed? How can we invert the roles of the speaker who dictates and the listener who hears? Where is the border of the sonorous? How many possibilities does this format afford? Where will our conversation take us?

Activity guides:

Paula Ducay and Inés García are the founders of the Punzadas project, in which they organise different cultural activities and direct the cultural podcast, Punzadas Sonoras. They have worked with different media like Cadena Ser, Diario.es and Carne Cruda. Drawing from their philosophical training, they reflect on issues they consider relevant in a fresh, precise way, drawing from different philosophical and literary references.

Event type

Universidad Popular Session

Event Date

Wed, 14/05/2025 - 16:30 -Wed, 14/05/2025 - 19:30

Event image

Picture: Ediciones Menguantes.

Subtitle

Paula Ducay and Inés García (Punzadas Sonoras)

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UN FOTOGRAMA EN BLANCO. LOS LÍMITES DE LA REPRESENTACIÓN.

E_DLM34 — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 15:15:21 +0000

AN EMPTY FRAME. THE LIMITS OF REPRESENTATION E_DLM34 Wed, 02/04/2025 - 17:15

AN EMPTY FRAME. THE LIMITS OF REPRESENTATION

Date: 7 May.
Time: 4:30 pm, leaves Móstoles. 7:30 pm, returns to Móstoles. Length: 3 hours.
Journey there: 30 minutes. Journey back: 30 minutes.
Venue: Coslada (bus departing from CA2M Museum)
Advance registration via the form starting on 30 April at 6:30 pm.

Reaching the North Pole means arriving in a white place. Proving this feat entails photographing or filming it. The fogging of a film is an empty frame. Sticking a flag into the geographic North Pole means marking a point on a drifting ice floe. The addiction to images is an empty frame. A point that drifts around, that is no longer the North Pole, is an empty frame. Nothingness can be an empty frame, and snow blindness caused by overly bright light is an empty frame.

Hilo Moreno and Raúl Alaejos, an explorer and a filmmaker, share something in common: the need to record reality. The former does so to document his feats; the latter to create new stories. They are both attracted to extremes: the extremes of the planet, of representation and of human beings. They are interested in nonsense, folly, humour, exhaustion and absurdity, as well as failing and staging it.

On this small expedition, we’ll visit the impressive hollow bronze sculptures in Coslada that represent celebrated explorers. It could be a fun way to learn about this human need to signal, record, transcend and perpetuate ourselves.

Using a protocol meant for polar expeditions, we will take an exploratory and observational stroll through Coslada’s Dry Port neighbourhood accompanied by polar film materials and literature. Led by our guides’ experience, we will read texts and engage in symbolic actions, unlikely rituals and observation games to immerse ourselves in a fun, inspirational experience.

Activity guides:

Raúl Alaejos is a visual artist and director. He works in the field of film essays and non-fiction. In 2015, he founded the Serrin.tv production company, which focuses on hybrid communication and visual arts languages and is part of the stage company Serrucho.org.

He received the Leonardo grant from the Fundación BBVA for his project ‘Debajo del Polo Norte’ [Beneath the North Pole]. His filmography includes two ‘polar’ pieces: Elegy for the Arctic (2016), recorded for Greenpeace with the pianist Ludovico Einaudi on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard; and Objeto de estudio (2024), a docu-essay on scientific colonialism, the instrumentalisation of the glacial landscape, the myth of the good savage and cultural alterity. raulalaejos.com

Hilo Moreno has worked in the polar regions, both the Arctic and the Antarctic, his entire professional life, assisting on a variety of projects. In 2008, he began to work on the Spanish Antarctic base Juan Carlos I, where he accompanies researchers in their studies. Since 2016, he has been part of the Wind Sled Project, developing a zero-emissions vehicle that travels along the polar ice caps doing clean science. When he is in warmer latitudes, he works in training and disseminating exploration and science at the ends of the world. hilomoreno.es

Event type

Universidad Popular Session

Event Date

Wed, 07/05/2025 - 16:30 -Wed, 07/05/2025 - 19:30

Event image

Picture: "Casi", Raúl Alaejos.

Subtitle

Hilo Moreno and Raúl Alaejos

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Yes

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"MORIR DEBE SER UNA AVENTURA INCREÍBLE”: INVENTAR EL MÁS ALLÁ

E_DLM34 — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 15:08:10 +0000

‘TO DIE WOULD BE AN AWFULLY BIG ADVENTURE’: INVENTING THE GREAT BEYOND E_DLM34 Wed, 02/04/2025 - 17:08

‘TO DIE WOULD BE AN AWFULLY BIG ADVENTURE’: INVENTING THE GREAT BEYOND

Date: 30 April.
Time: morning and afternoon. From 11 am to 2 pm, workshop at the CA2M Museum. From 3:30 to 6 pm, activity at the cemetery.
Length: 3 hours in the morning, 2 1/2 hours in the afternoon.
Venue: CA2M Museum (morning) and Old Parish Cemetery of Móstoles (afternoon)
Registration: Via the form starting on 23 April at 6:30 pm.
Maximum capacity 20 people.

Peter was not quite like other boys; but he was afraid at last. A tremour ran through him, like a shudder passing over the sea; but on the sea one shudder follows another till there are hundreds of them, and Peter felt just the one. Next moment he was standing erect on the rock again, with that smile on his face and a drum beating within him. It was saying, ‘To die will be an awfully big adventure’.

This is what Peter Pan heard in his soul as the tide was rising and the islet where he was standing was becoming smaller and smaller. Injured by Captain Hook, he did not have the strength to fly. And we are using those words to try venturing an idea of the Great Beyond, first in the museum and later in the Móstoles cemetery. What will it be like to transition to this unknown place, impossible to know from here but possible to imagine? What type of ghosts will we be? The only thing not accepted in this workshop is absolutely nothing, death as the end of everything, because the goal is precisely to penetrate the Great Beyond as an excuse to make up stories about the unknown. This doesn’t mean that people who don’t believe in Something-Else-Afterward are not allowed, but they may have to make a greater effort to come up with stories.

Activity guide:

Sabina Urraca (San Sebastián, 1984) Writer and publisher. She grew up in Tenerife and has been living in Madrid for over twenty years. She is the author of the novels Las niñas prodigio (Fulgencio Pimentel, 2017), the winner of the Javier Morote Award granted by CEGAL; Soñó con la chica que robaba un caballo (Lengua de trapo, 2021); Chachachá (Dueto) (Comisura, 2023); El celo (Alfaguara, 2024), chosen 2024 book of the year by El Cultural and Escribir antes (Comisura, 2025), published by the Argentinian publishing house Bosque Energético under the title of Diario de novela. She has contributed to media like El País, El Cultural and Zenda and was the resident editor of the Caballo de Troya imprint (Penguin Random House) in 2023 and 2024. In 2020, she received the MFA in Spanish Creative Writing scholarship at the University of Iowa. In 2022, she received a Leonardo grant for creators from the Fundación BBVA.

Event type

Universidad Popular Session

Event Date

Wed, 30/04/2025 - 11:00 -Wed, 30/04/2025 - 14:00

Wed, 30/04/2025 - 15:30 -Wed, 30/04/2025 - 18:00

Event image

Picture: Ediciones Menguantes

Subtitle

SABINA URRACA

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Yes

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EL POLO INACCESIBLE

E_DLM34 — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 15:03:12 +0000

THE INACCESSIBLE POLE E_DLM34 Wed, 02/04/2025 - 17:03

THE INACCESSIBLE POLE

Date: 23 April.
Time: Leaves Móstoles at 4:30 pm, returns to Móstoles at 8:30 pm.
Length: 4 hours. Journey there: 60 minutes. Journey back: 60 minutes. 72 km.
Venue: Noblejas, Toledo (departing from the CA2M Museum)
Registration: Via the form starting on 9 April at 11 am.

An imaginary lookout point from which we can guess at the beginning and end of the horizon. A point equidistant to all known seas. A space as remote as it is anodyne. A landscape where perhaps, but only perhaps, nothing ever happens… Reaching an Inaccessible Pole is no easy job; you have to get help from both poetic cartography and state-of-the-art orienteering technology. But if we do manage to find it… what should we do there? How do you explore an inexplicable place? Guided by the book Exercises in Observation by the anthropologist Nicolas Nova, we will enter what George Perec called the ‘infra-ordinary’ and harness a skill that has virtually been lost: paying attention to what is around us. Through a series of exercises, we will slow down, sharpen all our senses and organise our findings in order to ultimately cross a fleeting border: the border of places that don’t exist.

Materials you should bring to participate in this session:

Notebook
Camera or phone
Pencils and markers
Recording device or app to make quick audio recordings
Bag for items collected
Binoculars (optional)
Magnifying glass (optional)

Event type

Universidad Popular Session

Event Date

Wed, 23/04/2025 - 16:30 -Wed, 23/04/2025 - 20:30

Event image

Picture: Ediciones Menguantes

Subtitle

Ediciones Menguantes (Lía Peinador and González Macías)

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683,3 KILÓMETROS Y 32 MILLAS NAÚTICAS. 5 DE JUNIO

VPP29 — Mon, 01 Apr 2024 11:04:27 +0000

683.3 KILOMETRES AND 32 NAUTICAL MILES. 5 JUNE VPP29 Mon, 01/04/2024 - 13:04

683.3 KILOMETRES AND 32 NAUTICAL MILES. 5 JUNE

Journey to the end of the world. The session will begin on 5 June at 2:30 pm and end on 6 June at 7 am.

On 18 April 1976, a sailor aboard the Galician fishing boat Eduardo Pondal glimpsed a small stranded boat in the waters off Cape Finisterre (a cape in Galicia whose name means ‘end of the world’). It was a vessel four and a half metres long painted yellow, red and white and christened Ocean Wave. They found the passport of the only crewmember in the cabin. Nine months earlier, after concluding the preparations for his project ‘In Search of the Miraculous’, the artist Jan Van Ader left from Los Angeles to cross the country in a car, towing the Ocean Wave behind him as far as the east coast of the United States. On 9 July 1975, he set sail from Chatham, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, with the aim of crossing the ocean in the boat until he reached Europe. The last recorded image of the artist is precisely aboard the Ocean Wave, vanishing into the horizon.

In this last session, we’ll embark upon an expedition to the sea in Finisterre. From the museum, we’ll travel until we reach the westernmost point of the known world, and once there, we’ll set sail on an ocean journey and go precisely 32 nautical miles from the coast to search for the miraculous.

Specific needs:

Appropriate clothing for heading out to sea.

Enough water and food for the land and sea journeys.

Event type

Universidad Popular Session

Event Date

Wed, 05/06/2024 - 14:30 -Thu, 06/06/2024 - 07:00

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LA M-203. 22 DE MAYO.

VPP29 — Mon, 01 Apr 2024 11:01:29 +0000

THE M-203. 22 MAY. VPP29 Mon, 01/04/2024 - 13:01

THE M-203. 22 MAY.

Tour and collective reading on the road. 6-10 pm

Little path

sandy tongue

lit

by corpses.*

There is a ghost road between Vallecas and Alcalá de Henares, a road that was never completed. A road that leads nowhere and therefore is an anomaly in journeys and progress. It is in the midst of dumps, industrial estates and barren nature. It contains the remains of buildings concluded in 2005 and vegetation peeking up through the cracks in the asphalt. It is 17 kilometres that some residents use to take walks or bicycle rides, and an occasional film is shot there.

The People’s University group will travel to this road and walk it to María Bastarós’s words as the sun sets. As if we are diving into one of her stories, the writer will prepare a lecture-story designed for this place, so that it accompanies us and dredges up something from its abandonment and future wreck that might lead us to think about aesthetics, art and the moment in which we live. We know how the story begins, but together we’ll have to discover how it ends.

María Bastarós is a writer, art historian and curator of exhibitions and performance series. She has written Historia de España contada a las niñas (Fulgencio Pimentel, 2018) and the storybook No era esto a lo que veníamos (Candaya, 2021), among other publications. She brings to the world extraordinary yet fully commonplace situations and scenes that conceal the politics and beauty that are never seen. In her work, fiction merges with sheer realism, always with the territory as the essential narrative element: her characters stray from the roads of the Monegros Desert, suffer from the heat of the Bardenas badlands, marvel at the motorway running over the ocean in the Florida Keys and swear off asphalt to dive into the forests in Valle de Tena.

*Translation of an excerpt from the story ‘Ritual iniciático’ from the book No era esto a lo que veníamos by María Bastarós.

Event type

Universidad Popular Session

Event Date

Wed, 22/05/2024 - 18:00 -Wed, 22/05/2024 - 22:00

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SIN COMIENZO NI FIN, CON LAGUNAS INTERIORES. 8 DE MAYO

VPP29 — Mon, 01 Apr 2024 10:57:03 +0000

WITHOUT BEGINNING OR END, WITH INTERIOR LACUNAE. 8 MAY VPP29 Mon, 01/04/2024 - 12:57

WITHOUT BEGINNING OR END, WITH INTERIOR LACUNAE. 8 MAY

Lecture and tour of the exhibition Déjà Vécu. What Has Already Been Lived, by the artist Asunción Molinos Gordo. 6:30—8:30 pm

We enter a dark room and gleaming forms in brilliant, glittering colours stand out. They are elaborately stored inside backlit vitrines like jewels in a grand mediaeval treasure. But not all that glitters is gold. At the end of the intestinal tract there is something ugly and stinky, although if we use a magnifying glass, presto! Tiny beings in implausible shapes that work together and generate new life magically appear. The artist Asunción Molinos Gordo focuses on waste, on what is seemingly useless, and she reveals it to us by magnifying it and giving it a place and a new existence. The same holds true with wool. In the past it was a means to obtain [AS1] everything: food, protection, currency, travelling… Spain’s white gold. Now it’s nothing more than agricultural waste. In this session, the artist herself invites us to reflect on the relativity of concepts like purpose and beauty through the pieces we find in her exhibition at the Museo CA2M, Déjà Vécu.

Asunción Molinos Gordo is a researcher and visual artist. Her practice is heavily influenced by disciplines like anthropology, sociology and cultural studies. She has produced works that reflect on land use, nomadic architecture, farmers’ strikes, regional bureaucracy, the transformation of rural work, biotechnology and the global food trade.

[AS1]Confirmar. Hemos incluido esta parte, que significa “un medio para conseguir (todo)”, ya que, de lo contrario, la enumeración siguiente resultaba un poco confusa.

Event type

Universidad Popular Session

Event Date

Wed, 08/05/2024 - 18:30 -Wed, 08/05/2024 - 20:30

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DES-VELANDO LA COLECCIÓN. 24 DE ABRIL.

VPP29 — Thu, 21 Mar 2024 10:56:59 +0000

DES-VELANDO LA COLECCIÓN [UN-VEILING THE COLLECTION]. 24 APRIL. VPP29 Thu, 21/03/2024 - 11:56

DES-VELANDO LA COLECCIÓN [UN-VEILING THE COLLECTION]. 24 APRIL.

Lecture and tour of the CA2M warehouses. Wednesday 24 April. 6:30 to 8:30 pm.

A museum can be many things at once. Perceptions of museums have varied over time and in each place in the world, but there is a common thread that almost always remains in their essence: tending to cultural objects which, when in a museum, become symbols that talk about ourselves as both individuals and society.

We at the Museo CA2M look after our contemporary art collection. Sometimes we also reveal ourselves by trying to stop, or at least slow down, the deterioration of matter. With artists, we learn how to reflect on the transformation of substance and the ephemeral. In short, we try to un-veil them, to remove the veils that fall on artworks over time and make it difficult for us to interpret them clearly, perceive them with our senses and enjoy them.

We will start the session accompanied by the works Vinil by Lyota Yagi and Masa conformada by Ixone Sádaba, which challenge us about the topic of the session. We’ll continue by analysing pieces by Teresa Margolles, Paula Rubio Infante and Charlotte Moth, among others, that pose different conservation problems. And finally, we’ll look into the temporality of supports and materials by observing the works at the museum (photographs that are fading or have some kind of chemical alteration, deteriorated resin, obsolete supports, etc.).

María Asunción Lizarazu, conservator, and Teresa Cavestany, restorer. Museo CA2M Collection Department.

Event type

Universidad Popular Session

Event Date

Wed, 24/04/2024 - 18:30 -Wed, 24/04/2024 - 20:30

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ABRIGAR EL FRÍO. 10 DE ABRIL.

VPP29 — Tue, 16 Jan 2024 10:30:20 +0000

PROTECTING THE COLD. 10 APRIL. VPP29 Tue, 16/01/2024 - 11:30

PROTECTING THE COLD. 10 APRIL.

We’ll leave in the morning and come back in the evening.

In Madrid’s hot summers, Queen Mariana of Austria would survive the oppressive heat by drinking her favourite beverage, aloja. This drink, which few people are familiar with today, was so popular during the seventeenth century that a royal order was needed to restrict the shops where it was made and served to one every three doorways.

This drink made of honey spiced with ginger, cinnamon, white pepper, clove and nutmeg was supposed to be served chilled, so its main ingredient, cool water, had to be drawn from the Guadarrama mountains in the form of ice and brought down directly from the iceboxes on its peaks. The clean snow enhanced its flavour and made it more refreshing.

Today the snowdrifts in the Guadarrama mountains can only be spotted a few months of the year, and they are constantly retreating. The snow is melting and disappearing from the mountains, just like those ice blocks that travelled on the backs of mules to the capital. It is disappearing as the aloja shops did, as are the walls of the abandoned ice wells, which were replaced by the fridges in our kitchens. Today snow, once meant for the most discerning palates, is blown out artificially by cannons at mountain ski resorts.

In this People’s University session, we want to witness this last snow and visit one of the famous constructions designed to do the impossible: keep it cold. We’ll take the opposite route, this time taking the ice from the city to the mountains, and with what is left, we’ll make and savour our own aloja there.

Interested participants will be notified of the exact route and time via email.

Event type

Universidad Popular Session

Event Date

Wed, 10/04/2024 - 10:00 -Wed, 10/04/2024 - 17:00

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