making a mountain out of a molehill

There are many pottery pieces in the CA2M Museum workshop that were shaped by the groups that visited us in 2022. They were very carefully fired, each in a school’s kiln. There they released all the water they contained, and when it evaporated, it dispersed through the air of Móstoles. There are also legions of small clay pieces that harbour the sorrows brought by the children who came with their class to the ‘De aquellos barros’ workshop last school year.

Clay contains four elements: soil, water so it can be shaped, air to dry and fire to be baked. Nana Baruque, one of the oldest goddesses of Candomblé, is the goddess of mud, clay, the marshes, drizzle. She welcomes you when you are born and bids you farewell when you die.

Tuesday mornings, on the Nana celebration day, the CA2M Museum activates a ritual that choreographs the entire session. In this workshop, where the children will be the mediums, we invoke the power of clay and the aliveness of objects. This workshop is a space of imagination, creation and magic, such necessary ingredients in our learning spaces.

We invite preschool and primary school classes to participate in this activity, in which we imagine a response to the question: What can we do with that clay? Leave school and enter a museum to touch, change, break, make noise and soften.

Adriana Reyes (anthropologist and creator in the field of the live arts) and Goya Batalla (teacher at Escuela Infantil Zaleo with a degree in American History, and a provocateur in the Art of Educating) know a lot about this. We have invited them to design this workshop in which children will make a new creation from something small, where the body, collective action and other contemporary art forms will be put into practice to turn something small into something extraordinary.