912760227

Madrid has a long and little-known Islamic legacy which is intertwined with the city’s history in a way that challenges the political and media discourses that present Islam and Muslims as unwanted, recent foreign arrivals. Madrid was founded in the eleventh century with the mixed name of Maŷrit and is the only current European capital with Islamic roots.

Its first history was written in Arabic, as were the names of its first known inhabitants. For 220 years, Madrid belonged to the broad Arab-Islamic geographic and cultural space that extended from the Duero River to the Sahara Desert, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Indus River. After being conquered and incorporated to the Kingdom of Castile in the late eleventh century, Madrid still had an Islamic presence for 500 more years through its Mudejar, Morisco and slave minorities.

This historical legacy is barely known because the history of Madrid has been recounted in light of its status as the urbs regia, the seat and symbolic embodiment of a power that has been presented as essential and exclusively Catholic and European, which has consequently tended to erase the material and symbolic traces of a past that was considered unsuitable. However, unexpected, subtle phantasmagorias of this past, both tangible and intangible, still exist in Madrid today and even inhabit the icons of Madrid’s identity.

This activity suggests a tour around different spaces of memory to engage in a reflection on the history and memory of Madrid in relation to concepts like identity, alterity, mestizaje and diversity.

Wednesday 19 June. 6-8 pm. Free activity with advance registration. Capacity: 25 people.

Daniel Gil-Benumeya, 1970. He was raised between Rabat and Madrid in a family associated with the imagined and cross-border geography of southern Spain. His academic training is in the field of Arab and Islamic Studies, and outside the academy he was trained in the neighbourhood community of Lavapiés and other areas of Madrid. He is currently a professor in the Department of Linguistics and Oriental Studies at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and scientific coordinator of the Centro de Estudios de Madrid Islámico (CEMI), which is affiliated with the Fundación de Cultura Islámica (FUNCI). His main line of research involves a range of issues associated with the past and present of Islam and populations considered Muslim in Europe. He specifically examines the processes of constructing identity and alterity and the role played by social representations of history and memory in this construction.

These months, the exhibitions will be filled with objects we may hover over, see from above or closer up. We suggest walking among them and under them, touching them and seeing what happens in that encounter.

We encourage you to engage in this collective experience, which is open to all types of groups, on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings. Each tour will be different, and we’ll make them up as we go.

We may visit Déjà Vécu. What Has Already Been Lived, the exhibition by the artist Asunción Molinos Gordo, where we may wonder what mysteries the flint of Madrid harbours or what the social life inside the microcosm where human intestinal bacteria live is like.

On this collective tour, we may also wander around the different sculptures that Teresa Solar has proposed for the first floor, or go up to the third floor to discover what stories the artist Ana Gallardo has brought back on her journey from Argentina.

The programme is targeted at any type of group: clubs, organisations or school groups.

Register in advance at 912760227 or educacion.ca2m@madrid.org.

We are pleased to partner with Amecum on these tours, which suggest different ways to approach the works of these artists

María Us is a Guatemalan activist who was a guerilla member during Guatemala’s armed internal conflict between 1960 and 1996.

As the outcome of the partnership between her and the artist Ana Gallardo, we are presenting a play in the form of a biographical act which tells the story of a forest that is both the memory of land struggles and the community’s means of sustenance, in an attempt to disinhibit and publicise the resistance of several generations of female bodies violated by their family members and fellow political activists, too.

MARÍA US

I am a woman with K'iche' roots. I speak my native language. Ever since I remember, I’ve worked the land a lot. I went to primary school in my community. What I remember from primary school: most of the teachers were Latino and they would hit and punish us over anything. And they forced us to study or speak Spanish. I liked to play and run, and I imagined that when I was a bit older, I would go far from my family to study and teach the children of my village. Everything changed when the government of Guatemala began to damage and murder. That was my dream no more. I think that schools should not be enclosed; children should not be inside four walls; they should study in a place where they coexist with nature. Someday I’ll teach children.