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BEYOND FALLS THE SEA

UNIVERSIDAD POPULAR
Mar

Picture: Ediciones Menguantes

Directed by: José Luis González Macías and Lía Peinador 

‘Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Constant danger. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success.’ We are embarking on our journey to an imprecise destination with this blunt yet honest invitation attributed to the explorer Ernest Shackleton to recruit the crew for his legendary expedition to Antarctica.

Literature, curiosity and emotion will be our baggage on this voyage. We will embrace drifting and failure. We will make uncertainty our ally because if we accept it, we cannot do absolutely anything against its affronts or whims. We will camouflage ourselves in the thin line of boundaries and cross imaginary borders, directionless. We will walk in the shadow of thresholds. We’ll keep our senses alert. We’ll search for all types of traces. We’ll look for empty frames. We’ll invent the great beyond and be happy in our folly.

In this Universidad Popular course, we’ll turn into archaeologists of the everyday and adventurers of the infra-ordinary to set sail towards that unknown place where beyond falls the sea.

Lía Peinador is a publisher and translator and the head of Ediciones Menguantes (menguantes.com). She has taught several workshops on sound and independent publishing.

José Luis González Macías is a writer, designer, publisher and fan of maps since he was a boy. His book Breve Atlas de los Faros del Fin del Mundo [Brief Atlas of the Lighthouses of the World], which has been translated into more than fifteen languages, won the National Award for Best Edited Book in 2021.

The CA2M Museum offers a line of training activities in contemporary art and thinking framed within the tradition of the Universidad Popular, or adult education. These classes address some of the fundamental approaches to understanding and interpreting art today. They are divided into two parts: the first one consists of a guest speaker outlining a topic, while the second one is an open debate where the audience can have the floor. This organisation may shift into more experimental formats depending on the topic of each session.

PROGRAMME

23 April              THE INACCESSIBLE POLE / Lía Peinador and González Macías

30 April              ‘TO DIE WOULD BE AN AWFULLY BIG ADVENTURE’: INVENTING THE GREAT BEYOND / Sabina Urraca

7 May                 AN EMPTY FRAME / Raúl Alaejos and Hilo Moreno

14 May               BORDERS / Paula Ducay and Inés García (Punzadas Sonoras)

21 May               PARALLEL AND TEMPORARY LOST AND FOUND OFFICE (PTLFO) / Carolina Arabia

You must have attended four of the sessions to receive accreditation of the course upon request.

Fotograma en Blanco
Picture: "Casi", Raúl Alaejos.

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

Límites
Picture: Ediciones Menguantes.

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.

 

Objetos perdidos
Picture: Ediciones Menguantes

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.

Morir debe ser
Picture: Ediciones Menguantes

‘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.

El Polo inaccesible
Picture: Ediciones Menguantes

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)
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Activity type
Popular University
Target audience
Anyone interested
Duration
From 18:30 to 20:30
Dates
WEDNESDAYS 23 APRIL, 7, 14, 21 and 28 MAY
AN EMPTY FRAME. THE LIMITS OF REPRESENTATION
Event Date
-
BORDERS
Event Date
-
PARALLEL AND TEMPORARY LOST AND FOUND OFFICE (PTLFO)
Event Date
-
‘TO DIE WOULD BE AN AWFULLY BIG ADVENTURE’: INVENTING THE GREAT BEYOND
Event Date
-
-
THE INACCESSIBLE POLE
Event Date
-
Access
Enrolment free

Registration open for the activity AN EMPTY FRAME. THE LIMITS OF REPRESENTATION (Until 7 May)

REGISTRATION FORM
More information and contact
912760227
educacion.ca2m@madrid.org