2026 PICNIC SESSIONS: OPEN UP THE NIGHT

Illustration: Adara Sánchez.

“I lose days, life, sleep. But it’s not my fault if I desire death and life at once, at the same time, at the same hour. And I want everything at the same time.” Alejandra Pizarnik

Girls (whispering): Hey, sweeties, are you awake?

Sadness: Yes, fully awake... It’s impossible to sleep in this heat.

Girls: Yeah, we're all wide awake as well...

Sadness: What’s up? What’s on your mind?

Girls: Nothing special... It’s just that feeling that we could maybe be somewhere else right now, you know?

Sadness: Yeah, that happens sometimes... Do you want to come over to my place? We can do something, anything.

Girls: We were thinking that it’s ages since we went to a party. A really great, fantastic party, surprisingly tender, dramatic and luminous... A party that represents us!

Sadness: Well, of course, when you put it like that! These are strange times for parties... But anyway, come over, we’ll think of something. Come now. You can even come in your pjs!

Girls: Ok, we're on our way. In any case... it shouldn’t be too hard to have party in these times, should it? In these times, a party can simply be about pausing and being together. In these times, a party can be about loving and remembering we're lovable.

Sadness: Totally. In these times, a party can be about spending a great hour dancing. A great hour singing. A great hour told well.

Girls: Invoking the night so we can see the stars, if only for a moment. Invoking the night and making it last until we drop. Tired, sweaty, listening to a story, an idea, a song.

Sadness: As Juan de Mairena said, an hour well told would never finish being told. A party can also be about celebrating time and celebrating the night.

Girls: Girls getting together for a twilight picnic. That could be nice.

Sadness: Great, so that’s what we’ll do, ok? All we need is a nice place in the open air, some music and a hundred or maybe two hundred friendly people. That will change the night completely, take it to places we can’t imagine...open it up, right?

Girls: Yes, that’s it. Let the night open up.

Open up the night.

La tristura and Mucha Muchacha arrive at the Museo CA2M this year with a joint proposal for the 2026 Picnic Sessions. What they propose is a time of listening, dancing, watching. According to anthropologists, before we shared a language we shared rituals, which is essentially what makes us human. We want to share this ancient ritual with the people of the city, share the feeling of being hospitable in this century. We’ve sought out different artists to spend a few hours with at twilight, artists who strive to establish a unique relationship with our times, who can hold their gaze in these dark times we are living through, and who can also perceive a light in that darkness. Who can see the crack. So between 28 May and 2 July we’ll meet on the museum terrace and open up the night together.

“When the light leaves
and the sky’s black,
no nothing
to look at,
day’s done.
That’s it.” Robert Creeley

PROGRAMME

Thursday 28 May. Guillem Jiménez | Okkre
Thursday 4 June. Los Voluble
Thursday 11 June. Laura Morales | Fantasma Sur
Thursday 18 June. TEMPO DE FURIA (Egozkue and Paz) | Eddi Circa
Thursday 25 June. Carmen Muñoz | Derek van den Bulcke
Thursday 2 July. Natalia Fernandes | Las Víctimas Civiles

Time: 9 pm to 11 pm

CURATED BY:

Celso Giménez and Violeta Gil, members of La tristura, have been working in the performing arts field since they were twenty years old. Trying to generate “human situations” on and off the stage. Investigating the limits between presentation and representation, with a special focus on contemporary theatre, and committed to the intuition that intimacy and poetry are essentially political concepts. During this time, La tristura has collaborated with venues like the Teatros del Canal in Madrid, the Grec Festival in Barcelona, Cena Contemporânea in Brasilia, the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris, Noorderzon in Groningen, and the AUA Festival in Bern, among others. Over the years they have also generated contexts like the Escuela de Invierno, Festival Salvaje and the Gran Convocatoria Mundial, all with the desire to keep connecting different agents and artists, trusting that these connections will give rise to unexpecting and inspiring movements. In recent years they have started solo projects and new collaborations in the fields of cinema, the stage and literature. Their work is still tied to Madrid, the city where they live and develop their projects.

Ana Botía and Belén Martí have been directing the dance company Mucha Muchacha since 2016, together with Marina de Remedios and Marta Mármol. Since the outset, their work has been focused on researching the body as a space of memory, identity and transformation, creating proposals that combine tradition and contemporaneity. Their performance language incorporates elements of folklore, pop music and Spanish dance codes, reconfigured through a critical gaze rooted in the present. Since its birth the company has created Volumen 1 (2019), Mucha Muchacha (2021), Para cuatro jinetes (2023) and more recent projects like Cantar de gesta (2026) in which they continue to explore the relationship between body, narrative and collectivity. Mucha Muchacha has developed a collaborative practice with artists from different disciplines, generating research and mediation projects like SERÉ FOLCLORE and the TALLER-FIESTA project.

28 May

He appears on the Picnic Sessions terrace moving like someone from another planet, like an MC opening the first of all the nights to come. Guillem appears with his OLIVER 06 and then enters a sound journey to draw us a little closer to what we can’t see and that transports us, like a siren song, to other landscapes through HIBRID - Una convocatoria al atardecer [HYBRID: A Call to Twilight], by the artist Okkre.

Guillem

Guillem Jiménez presents OLIVER 06, a project developed by laSADCUM, the company he directs and in which different investigations become dance capsules that operate like physical essays on digi-modernist poetics. OLIVER is a “sadcumised” character who uses satire to reflect on capitalism, digitalisation, illusionism and techno-feudalism. OLIVER operates like a “world-glimpsing” window onto the poetic-fictional world of laSADCUM.

Each time a new dimension. Each time a new body essay.

Guillem Jiménez is a Barcelona-based choreographer and dancer whose practice sits firmly in the realm of contemporary dance. In 2019 he founded the laSADCUM project, through which he has created pieces like THE LESSON, ACLUCALLS and NAVAJA. His work is rooted in the analysis of post-internet society, addressing themes like technology, control, capitalism and consumption, which has earned him recognition and a presence in different European scenarios.

okkre

Okkre brings us HIBRID - Una convocatoria al atardecer. For the 2026 Picnic Sessions Okkre has created a hybrid live DK set + concert in which to draw a constantly changing soundscape. Rhythm, textures and an atmospheric creation that will take us on a journey through the fringes.

Drawing on her expertise as a creator of “music for movement” in collaboration with international performers and choreographers, Okkre invites us to a session in which she articulates an itinerary in dialogue with bodies that listen, through which to experience new forms of collective dance.

Okkre (Uge Pañeda) is a composer of electronic music and sound designer whose practice combines techno, dark ambient and references to opera and contemporary classical music. Characterised by a meticulous visual austerity, her work has been presented at international festivals like L.E.V. Gijón, Sónar Barcelona, Atonal Berlin and MUTEK Mexico, reaffirming her presence on the contemporary scene.

4 June

It feels like we're at a party. Is this a party? If feels like it, yes, it must be. It’s a party because I want to dance and I want to talk to my friends. I move and think all the time with this alarm bell that’s always challenging me, firing questions at the rhythm of this strange twenty-first century. Los Voluble open the second night with their Voz de Alarma.

voluble

Voz de Alarma combines flamenco, electronic music and a social critique of genocide, fake news and climate change. In the same vein as Flamenco is not a Crime (2019) and JALEO IS A CRIME (2022), the show uses flamenco as a contemporary tool of reflection, incorporating collaborations with local artists who provide materials for remixing and live improvisation; where past and present are intertwined in a contemporary audiovisual about the world’s ills. Humour and hot political topics also make an appearance as a way of hacking algorithms and asking questions about the society we live in. On this occasion Los Voluble will be accompanied by the dancers and creators Laura Morales and Teresa Garzón, exploring with them the flamenco aspect of dance and reconstructing video footage live.

“The alarm bell of wars.
The alarm bell against genocide.
The alarm bell about ways of living in the world.
The alarm bell about joyful struggles and rebellion.
The alarm bell as a scream from our bodies.
The alarm bell to never stop laughing.”
Los Voluble

Los Voluble: Pedro and Benito Jiménez are an artistic duo who have been merging flamenco, electronic culture and critical thinking for more than two decades. They forged their style as a cross between traditional and contemporary, creating experimental proposals filled with humour, social struggles and reflections on modern society. With their unique language and singular proposals, Los Voluble occupy an exceptional position on the national and international stage.

11 June

We start in an open field, as if we were a long way from the city. Someone will round us all up. The herder calls and the sheep climb up to the terrace. There, Laura dances, sings and cradles us. She calls it La Nueva Bestia [The New Beast].

Then we’ll enter a spectral night, where the genres will be mixed up and it will feel a little like a concert, a little like the cinema, a little like a haunted house with Fantasma Sur.

Laura Morales

Laura Morales presents La Nueva Bestia, a piece she created out of her research for the Ser Pastora project. This piece turns the stroll to the performance space into a transhumance. It’s a shout-out to rural exodus, to herds that no longer migrate, to the disappearance of generational replacement, and to the gender gap. “This piece doesn't begin now, it's already begun. The entire path we’ve followed to make it here today already forms part of the piece. Now, just connect with the group and listen to my shout marking the start of this journey. I also have a whistle that the mountains will echo back to you if we stray too far apart; and a song in case a surprise scatters us, so we can come back to the calm of our grazing lands.”

Laura Morales is a choreographer and dancer. She left university to go to dance school, where she started creating and researching her own pieces. For several years she has been accompanying female herders in their transhumance. Ser Pastora is her latest piece.

FantasmaSur

Fantasma Sur: Alondra Bentley’s voice and melodies merge with Ylia's electronic textures and rhythms. This unexpected encounter gives rise to atmospheric spectral music, songs about ghosts written with the filmmaker Isaki Lacuesta who, together with visual artist Albert Coma, is responsible for the film projections that interact live with the music. Songs that float on ambient tracks, pixellated limbos, echoes of fantasy films and sonic journeys in time. “It all began one day when we started talking about Mark Fisher.” Fantasma Sur points towards a parallel reality where all genres can intersect (k-punk, ghost story, spoken work, vampire love letters), a house haunted by spectres free from past lives.

Fantasma Sur is a project developed by Alondra Bentley (singer and composer), Ylia (electronic music composer and producer), Isaki Lacuesta (filmmaker and writer) and Albert Coma (visual artist). In the next few months we’ll be able to listen to their first album as a collective.

18 June

Last hour of light and last hour to give it everything you’ve got on the dance floor. Someone talks to us, inviting us to claim the space, to tire ourselves out, to refrain from looking at how other people dance. The party will be intense but then we can rest. Maybe lying down, maybe leaning against the wall, we’ll catch our breath and listen to the stories that Eddi Circa will share in secret. Why is it that tired, after dancing, we listen to secrets better?

fiesta

TEMPO DE FURIA (Egozkue and Paz) present their FIESTA INTENSIVA, a twenty-first-century dance hall. A live, uninterrupted movement practice with a soundtrack. It’s a space to take some time out, a time to exhaust the dance in the body, to exorcise the demons and make them dance. The session will be structured around improvisation guidelines, “keys” to activate personal, incomparable ways of dancing in relation to the collective. A call to irreverence, especially with regard to ourselves. The idea is to question and perhaps suspend the “notions of dancing” that condition us when we move. Will it be possible?

Javiera Paz and Manuel Egozkue started working together in the fields of performing arts and dance in February 2020. TEMPO DE FURIA is their name as a collective. Composers, choreographers and performers, they also collaborate with different stage and audiovisual projects.

edi Circa

Eddi Circa presents for the first time in public her piece Siete fábulas muy breves: Echo de menos a todo el mundo [Seven Very Short Fables: I Miss Everyone], in relation to the composition of her new album.

“At night, in the dark, with strangers and under the influence of the party and exhaustion, I share seven stories, seven fables about incidents, problems and conflicts with abundant signs. Stories about fucking around, wandering aimlessly through the city, wasting time, waiting for the incident to unfold, seeing the sign, the sign charging you. After the charge, obliged and violated, decoding the sign that the street, the Tuesday, the lover suggests to you. Calming down, sleeping and the next morning starting again. Epistemology of does 3000. Not an emotion, only an incident.”

Eddi Circa is a composer and guitarist with a PhD in Physics from the University of Alcalá. She is currently working on her next album under the influence of a philosophical and literary genealogy of lesbians and dissidences.

25 June

It seems that tonight there’s a pact with those above and those below. Lorca said, “There are things locked within walls that, if they were to suddenly burst out into the street and scream, would fill the world.” Tonight, flamenco sneaks through every crack in every wall. It’s as if a pact existed between those who were and those who will be. It's as if a prayer existed, a way of invoking. Tonight there’s a pact with the night itself, invoked by Carmen and Derek with Invocation and FLAMANTE.

carmen

Carmen Muñoz kicks the night off with Invocation, an investigation into performance that revolves around the bodies of postmodern dance—Steve Patxon, Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown—and the entire historical constellation they represent. Channelling them, she proposes a journey through flamenco based on a physical and mystical exploration, like a dance of invocation, that culminates in the intuitive and spontaneous present body, in which the boundaries of dance are blurred. What is the body of the present? What are its ties to the world?

Carmen Muñoz is a dancer, choreographer and researcher who trained at the Institut del Teatre in Barcelona, where she also teaches. During her career she has focused on researching the body and flamenco, developing an artistic practice that combines stage theory and experimentation, participating in collaborative projects that explore new forms of choreographic creation and thinking.

Derek

We’ll end the night enjoying the imagination of Derek van den Bulcke with FLAMANTE, a project of musical research and production carried out with the flamenco singer Curro Rodríguez and the performer Carmen Muñoz. With a sound that travels between experimental music and pop culture, FLAMANTE connects with different audiences: from ambient and techno lovers to those who seek the emotion of great hymns. His style draws on global references, flamenco and the latest electronic music.

Derek van den Bulcke is a musical creator, DJ and independent artist who develops his practice from an art research perspective that incorporates sound, context and experimentation. He creates his work individually and collectively, showing it at major venues and institutions. At the same time, he is expanding his creative language to the visual arts and other contemporary formats.

2 July

This is the last night, our last session. A girl wearing sunglasses tells us that carnival isn't joyful; like Rosalía de Castro said, “Triste é o cantar que cantamos, mais, ¿qué facer si outro mellor non hai?” [“Sad is the song we sing, but what to do if there is no other better?”]. A concert that isn’t a concert, a deep, tender party in which maybe, after all, there is also a moment to shake your body without inhibition. To end, Las Víctimas Civiles in their duo version will sing some contemporary classics like Canción Total and will present some of the songs from their new album soon to be released.

natalia

Natalia Fernandes presents El Carnaval No Es Alegre, a concert without any musical talent in which Natalia dances accompanied on stage by Iván Mozetich. The creator invites the audience to experience a carnival built around a playlist that navigates between the political/historical context of Brazil and a migrant body in search of a home. A concert to accept contradictions, dance trauma and shake your body.

Natalia Fernandes is a choreographer, dancer and creator of the Invented Anatomy methodology. She’ll be accompanied on stage by Iván Mozetich, stage creator and arts administrator. In December 2025 they premiered their first collaborative piece, Objeto Não Identificado, produced by the Centro de Cultura Contemporánea Conde Duque and the Mercat de les Flors.

victimas

Las Víctimas Civiles, Héctor Arnau and Pau Miquel Soler, present a concert-in-progress format: a show where the audience watches an album being made before their eyes. Throughout the performance, the duo string together songs, spoken fragments, old hits by the band and improvisations that operate as the different pieces of an album being put together before the listeners. The repertoire is therefore open to detours, comments and new compositions incorporated as the night progresses, allowing the concert to adopt the unpredictable form of a work still being developed. In this new period of their career, they explore more romantic, confessional songs without abandoning the irony, dark humour and critical edge that have always characterised the group. A light, changing stage set that oscillates between cabaret, spoken work, stand-up and acoustic concert.

This irregular, protest-song band emerged on the fringes of poetry, pop music and the contemporary scene. The duo version features the poet and performer Héctor Arnau and the musician Pau Miquel Soler.

With the support of

Activity type

Picnic Sessions

Target audience

Anyone interested

Duration

21:00 - 23:00

Dates

28 May – 2 July

28 May

Event Date

2026-05-28 -2026-05-28

4 June

Event Date

2026-06-04 -2026-06-04

11 June

Event Date

2026-06-11 -2026-06-11

18 June

Event Date

2026-06-18 -2026-06-18

25 June

Event Date

2026-06-25 -2026-06-25

2 July

Event Date

2026-07-02 -2026-07-02

Access

Attendance open and free while places last

FULL PROGRAMME

More information and contact

912760227

actividades.ca2m@madrid.org

Actividades asociadas

Actividad

29 MAY - 3 JULY

BIG DAY_PICNIC SESSIONS 2025

We have declared ourselves the mayors of that place called Picnic Sessions 2025 of the CA2M Museum in Móstoles and we’re inviting you to its annual festival.

30 MAY - 4 JULY

PICNIC SESSIONS 2024. [...] I went to the hills and brought back something nice for you.

In this edition of the Picnic Sessions 2024, we’re going to put our hands on the earth, ask for permission, head back to the bush. We’re going to connect with the Ashe, with gestures, myths, rites, wisdom, listening. We’re going to dance resistances and fleetingness, celebrate the differences of this living hill-Caribbean-archive. We’re going to bless ourselves with the Caribbean pica-pica before crossing the sea with the permission of the dead women who replenish it with tears every day, with the license of the blood, chains and Orishas that live there.

Performance

25th May to 29th June

PICNIC SESSIONS 2023. PALABRA CHACHACHÁ

The Picnic Society was born in London at the beginning of the 19th century, an association that met regularly in the open air and at whose gatherings each member was expected to provide part of the entertainment and refreshments without a specific host. Based on this concept, and in the manner of the Picnic Society, the Museo Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo invites several curators each year to design a programme for the Museum's terrace. Every Thursday from the end of May until the end of June.