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

Design: La flor del Tamarindo

The first time I entered the hills, Godmother asked me to put my hands on the ground and then bring them to my mouth and kiss them. She told me to go around the kapok tree three times, the guardian of the hills’ eye where she buried her staff, and to look up waiting for signs of permission. As I was looking at the sky, a few drops fell on my face to the beat of a flutter of birds dancing with the prayer that Godmother was whispering, embracing the roots of the mystery.

yenyere guma good evening, good evening

yenyere guma, good evening, how are 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. On the museum’s terrace between 30 May and 4 July, we are going to activate a ceremony in six stages (Rupture, Prayer, Supplication, Trance, Manifestation, Coronation) to break away from ethnographic lenses that burden our bodies, territories, geographies, spiritualities and creations with exoticising, simplifying tales. 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.

We’re going to paint the body with soil and salt; mark each step in the sand while the echoes of the calling drum resonate in the thickness. Check each leaf and each stone as part of the legacy that sustains and narrates us. Look at the sky and talk with the clouds, with the stars, with the sun and the moon, who guide our walking and our singing. Feel the wind that carries our ancestors’ secrets, that whispers stories of freedom and forgotten struggles. Each step in the hills is an act or recovery, an act of memory that challenges the imposed oblivion, that unearths the truths concealed under the weight of history written by others.

Godmother said that there was a tunnel under the tallest caguairán tree on the mountain, which led her directly home whenever she wanted to embrace her Nigerian great-grandmother. Godmother believed in witches and shapeshifters, in güijes —local mythical creatures— and in the two-headed boa that predicted the future on Saint John’s Eve. Godmother flew on a traditional twig broom and was familiar with all the good and bad herbs for remedies. Godmother listened to the owls, the moon and the foolish snakes in the mangrove swamp from her swinging rope over the coloured earth. Every Friday she blessed and cleansed with basil, verbena and red flowers. At some point in the ceremony, she fell into a trance and her body was occupied by the old Sarabanda, who always came singing:

I went to the hills and brought back

something nice for you

something nice for you

something nice for you

José Ramón Hernández (Palma Soriano 1988)

He is a non-disciplinary Afro-Cuban artist who graduated from the Instituto Superior de Arte of Cuba. He is the founder and artistic director of Osikán – Creation Incubator and the Afronteriza Residency of the Centro Cultural Espacio Afro in Madrid. His practice ranges between artistic direction, dramaturgy, choreography, curation, installation, performance, education, mediation and cultural management. He is a spiritualist, babalocha and palero.

His creative investigation focuses on Afro-descendant rituals, performativities, peripheral bodies, materials, spiritualities, memories, migrations, cartographies and desires. He tests the boundaries between fiction and reality, work with non-fictional documents and the tools of the senses to affect and intervene in social and community processes.

He won the Circuito de las Artes Plásticas Award of the Community of Madrid in 2022 with the installation Ojú inú yàrá, the Villanueva Critics’ Award (Unión Nacional de Artistas de Cuba, UNEAC, and International Association of Theatre Critics) and the Aire Frio Award (Asociación de jóvenes escritores y artistas de Cuba) for the 2016 work BaqueStriBois; and first prize at the 2006 La Fiesta de las Relaciones for the work Maferefún pa Antonia.

His works have been shown in Cuba, Mexico, Chile, the Dominican Republic, Canada, Germany, Belgium, the United States, Brazil and Spain.

Picnic Sessions 2024 - Session 6: Coronation - Thursday 4 July

Madrid Negro

BLACK MÓSTOLES. Madrid Negro Laboratory

(AFTERNOON ACTIVITY WITH PRE-REGISTRATION STARTING 4 JUNE)

Black Móstoles is an initiative of the Madrid Negro team, an artistic investigation project based on historical memory and the contemporary heritage of Black and Afro-descendant people in the Community of Madrid. This time, the project is centred in the periphery, in the town of Móstoles, where we will unpack the stories of marronage and resistance among Black and Afro-descendant people. Through an immersive poetry and sound route, we invite the residents of Móstoles to walk through the city streets from another place of listening. The purpose of this activity is a conversation that reflects on and commemorates intra-history.

Yeison F. García (1992, Cali). A political scientist, poet and researcher, he self-identities as Afro-Colombian and Afro-Spanish. He is the curator of the Festival Conciencia Afro (2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019), the director of the Espacio Afro Cultural Centre and the co-curator of the show La memoria colonial en las colecciones Thyssen-Bornemisza [Colonial Memory in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collections] held at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza.

María Paula Irizarry Guzmán (1997, Cabo Rojo). She is an Afro-Puerto Rican and pan-Caribbean historian and political scientist. She has a dual degree from the Universidad de Puerto Rico in Political Science and History of the Americas and an inter-university master’s degree in Contemporary History from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid with a thesis on Hispanism and its geopolitical and identity implications on Puerto Rico.

Nieves Cisneros Pascual (1995, Madrid). A multidisciplinary artist and researcher, she is the director of Viola Odorata (Honourable Mention at the 34th Certamen Arte Joven Castilla y León in 2022) and Nuestro Mapa (2019, Tecnica della Rappresentazione de Claudia Castellucci series). One of her most prominent papers is about her research into her Afro-Cuban great-grandfather Joaquín Pascual Síboris, a musician and founding member of the Madrid Philharmonic Orchestra.

Malcolm Riascos (1996, Cali). He is a film and digital communication professional with an emphasis on business management and scriptwriting for film and television. A director, editor and photographer, he is the co-founder and CEO of MIDMEDIA (2016), a company that works in advertising, music and film.

Rubén Monsuy (1985, Bata). Raised in Bioko, he is a documentary film and TV scriptwriter and director at the Madrid Film Institute. His prominent works include Lámpara (2013 Ceiba Award at the South-South Travelling Film Festival, FECIGE) and J”osefina: Árbol de muchas ramas (produced by ACIGE and financed by UNICEF).

PHOTO courtesy of the collective

Instagram: @madridnegro.lab

Ondulaciones

TEMPORARY UNDULATIONS II. In the Wake: Experimental Black Thinking Laboratory

Voices and bodies appear in Móstoles 2024 which reactivate the Black-maroon memory that has always existed but not been recounted. Fugitive, underground voices, collective whispers that tell the story of a transatlantic fable that connects the revolutionary Haiti of 1804 with the rebellious Móstoles calling for independence in 1808. There is a common nexus between the two of them: post-revolutionary Napoleonic France, which insisted on keeping up Black slavery in its colonies in the Caribbean and Haiti. One figure, Toussaint, a time-traveller, whispers to us through the dreams and sound of Yembé about the secrets unleashed of the two connected declarations. A trip back in time.

In the Wake is a theoretical-artistic collective made up of artists and thinkers from the Afro-diaspora who live in Spain. It emerged in Madrid in 2021 with the goal of exploring forms of Black Radical Thinking in Spain, as well as contributing to activating it. Constructing a story around the Afro-diasporic memory in the colonial metropole must necessarily start with the search and hunt for the footprints of this memory in the cultural archive, as well as unpacking what ancestral forms of knowledge transmission were developed in a territory where ‘narratives of anti-Black de-territorialisation’ dominate. From In the Wake, we have traced, found and reconstructed the stories of resistance of Black people in the Kingdom of Spain. Through its research and activation work, it has connected different artists on the international Afro scene with creative Afro communities in the Community of Madrid.

PHOTO Matadero Madrid / Estudio Perplejo

Instagram: @inthewakelab

Odara

ODDARA FESTIVAL. Afro Consciousness

In Yoruba, Oddara means ‘everything is fine’. The Oddara Festival invites you to connect with ancestrality, the spirituality of the drum, flavour and joy, desire, African and diasporic beats.

Afro Consciousness is a cultural, social and political project created in 2016 whose mission is focused on contemporary artistic creation, the production of critical thinking and the promotion of community projects that revolve around the right to culture and to the city. The Espacio Afro Cultural Centre, which opened in 2022, promotes cultural democracy by facilitating the creation and dissemination of projects spearheaded by people and organisations belonging to the African and Afro-descendant communities, as well as other immigrant and/or racialised peoples and communities, with the idea of contributing to building a city where intercultural coexistence is fostered.

PHOTO Tamarind flower

Instagram: @fiestaoddara @espacioafro

Osikan 2

ORUN SECO - CLOSURE. Yunieski Gil, Ignacio Calderón and Osikán – Creation Incubator

Orun Seco is a sacred sequence played with batá drums to close a wemilere (festival) in Santería. Orun Seco is heard directly by Orishas, heralds the end of the festive ceremony and leaves blessings for the space and the participants with the spiritual and percussive power of the leather drumheads.

Godmother told me that to close a ceremony, a festival or a series properly, you have to play the drum and invoke its mystery. To close it properly you also have to express gratitude and embrace. We are closing the Picnic Sessions 2024 with the drums of Osikán and a collective embrace, and Godmother is going back to her hills’ eye, grateful and happy, leaving us the seeds of ball moss, snowberry, yaya stick and amansaguapo.

Godmother whispers in my ear: this museum terrace is no longer a garden; it is a jungle, and now you have to care for it. Godmother looks from the highest step in the stands, and before flying away on her fugitive slave’s twig broom she sings::

goodbye folks / goodbye folks / I’ll be back another year / I’ll be back another year / that you’re all here

PHOTO La Casa Encendida/ Estudio Perplejo

Instagram: @osikan_vivero_de_creacion

Picnic Sessions 2024 - Session 5: Manifestation - Thursday 27 June

Unicornio

NO SOY UNICORNIO [I’M NOT A UNICORN]. Martica Minipunto

This unicorn retraces the streets of Havana. This animal discovers itself in other bodies and pleasures, in other mythologies and captivities. No soy unicornio [I’m not a Unicorn] is a performative lecture that explores the relationships among biography, power and utopia. Based on a film that documents the grammar of the crowds at the city fair, poems with the same title and an eccentric collection of unicorns, it examines the obsession through which it symbolises an intact or amputated horn. No soy unicornio is an act of protest through an imaginary species; the desire to free oneself of the persecution of the red bull, which is the form taken by all fears.

Martha Luisa Hernández Cadenas (Martica Minipunto), (Cuba, 1991). She is a writer and performer who graduated from the Universidad de las Artes, ISA, with a specialisation in Theatre Studies. She has published several poetry collections: Días de hormigas (Ediciones Unión, 2018, and David Poetry Award, 2017), Los vegueros (Colección Sureditores, 2019) and El Palacio de las Ursulinas (Ediciones La Luz, 2021). Her novel, La puta y el hurón, published by Sabina Urraca in Caballo de Troya, 2023, earned the Franz Kafka Novel Award in 2020. Her creations include the performances Nueve (2017), No soy unicornio (2019) and Escribir con la lengua (2022). No soy unicornio won the ZKB Acknowledgement Prize at the 2022 edition of the Zürcher Theater Spektakel festival. She is the founder of the independent publishing house Ediciones Sinsentido.

PHOTO Joanna Montero

@_martikminipunto

Lucrecia

THE SKY IS HERALDING RAIN FOR TOMORROW. Lucrecia Masson

The wind teaches how to read; the sky manifests itself. The wind buffets songs and the sky is a messenger. Both invite us to a cosmopolitan, sensorial conversation where we are hosted by a terrace and an evening. It is an anticolonial experiment in writing and body(s), in theory and imagination, in investigation and invention. We start with a ruminant epistemology, where the move from one stomach to another summons a process that occurs in a slow, non-linear fashion, where slowness is the hostess. And the popular languages and ancestral knowledge teach us how to listen to the voices of companion entities, like the wind, like the sky. We summon the expanse with the intention of looking around, not forward, striving through this act to unlearn, to once again walk through places, to see what was already there and chew on it again, the way ruminants do.

It is an invitation to activate ways of paying attention, of attending. Attending, which is also caring. An invitation to the encounter with/among songs and oral literatures for contemplation.

Lucrecia Masson Córdoba. Committed to impurity, she moves between the fields of art and philosophy. Her main topics of inquiry are bodies, animalities and sexual and corporal dissidences from an anticolonial vantage point. She experiments with different registers, especially with forms of writing. What interests her about theory is the imagination, and she doggedly believes that we cannot think without our bodies. She has been researching with ruminants for years. She is a member of the Ayllu Collective.

PHOTO iki yos piña narváez funes

@lucrecia_mc

Poto

POTO CON ROCOTO. Nayare Soledad Otorongx

Poto con Rocoto is the sound project of Nayare Soledad Otorongx, a transvestite, transdisciplinary Andean-descendant artist living in Madrid, who uses writing and music to evoke the echoes of pleasure, contradiction, the power of life and the beating of sexual dissidence. Poto con Rocoto is the noise proposing a nostalgic, joyful order where memory and the ancestral future can move to the beat, drawing from a set of rhythms and lyrics from a range of styles like cumbia, perreo, guaracha and Latin core.

Nayare Soledad Otorongx. She is an Andean-descendant transvestite, writer of spells and memories that have not yet happened, an accidental illustrator of flyers, a courier and a disc jockey. Her projects occupy the visual and sound planes to bring back the transvestite ancestrality and memory that shape today’s reality, suggesting different ways of diverting imposed futures from that place. She has participated in projects at Matadero Madrid, CA2M, El Círculo de Bellas Artes, the National Anthropology Museum, La Parcería, Espacio Afro and others. She self-published her poetry collection Bendiciones Travestis y algunas maldiciones in 2021 and has participated in literary projects with Juf Project, in addition to being the co-author of Matria Poética along with many other brilliant poets.

PHOTO Anna Fux

Instagram: @paellaypaelle

https://soundcloud.com/potoconrocoto

Picnic Sessions 2024 - Session 4: Trance - Thursday 20 June

Marina

IN TRANSIT. Marina Santo (creation, direction and performer)_,Íren Márquez Dos Santos (creation and production of the sound space)

‘In transit’ is a term that describes the flow of elements with mobility that go from one place to another. This movement implies a course whose endpoint results in a change in state, movements that shift towards sound, sounds that flow towards movement. Currents that vibrate while crossing through a shared sensoriality, dancing variations and sounding shapes. The action is the outcome of the dialogue between Marina’s corporality and Íren’s sound universe, joined by a profound bond that links the sea and the entire imaginary that unfolds from their cosmovision. En Tránsito [In Transit] is an open act, an invitation to share a moment together via the body, experimenting collectively.

Marina Santo (Río de Janeiro, 1978). From a very young age, Marina took regular classes in different types of dance in her hometown, but she regards the street and the night as her main schools. Now living in Europe, she trained with many artists and works professionally in different dance collectives and companies in a more experimental vein. For more than a decade, Marina has dedicated herself to creating and making projects associated with exploring contemporary bodywork with the most varied people and communities. Her reflection on the contemporary body, art made by dissidents and the quest for a personal language free of definitions marks her career as an investigator and creator.

Íren Márquez Dos Santos is an Afro-descendant artist and producer from Madrid who inquires into and embraces the forms of resistance and healing of diasporic communities through sound. Bringing together musical production, sound workshops and performance, their investigation revolves around the sea and its political materiality, focusing on the potential of underwater sound to expose fractured and conflictive environmental realities which have repercussions on colonial and neocolonial historical narratives on the surface of the water.

PHOTO Fernanda Carvalho IG feufotografia

Instagram: @soymarinasanto @x_iiren

www.marinasanto.com

https://soundcloud.com/rasputia-281869501

Camilo

VAIVÉN [SWAY]. Camilo Mejía

‘“Sway” is an oscillating, fluctuating or sweeping motion’.

VAIVÉN [Sway] takes a journey though the universe of salsa, revealing an entire personal and collective imaginary amidst sways which connect the Afro-Colombian Pacific and the Afro-Antillean Caribbean through what Camilo likes to call ‘diasporic resonance’. VAIVÉN starts as a process of performative exploration and investigation which alters the architectural space by finding that spatial-temporal chink that enables a Black, maroon, queer and trans-temporal imaginary of flight to seep through, giving rise to different narratives, perspectives and constellations. In VAIVÉN, the vanishing point is in salsa. Some part of VAIVÉN escapes, ‘cannot be seen (pause), but is felt’.

Camilo Mejía (Cali, Colombia). He is a multidisciplinary artist who always works in contact with music and dance. He began his dance training in Barcelona at the age of 21. His interest in improvisation and performance led him to Salzburg SEAD (Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance), where he was the guest artist for the production of ‘Sounds of Trap’ by the choreographer Cecilia Bengolea in the SEAD Bodhi Project company during his last year of school. He has participated in different productions with Needcompany, including ‘War and Turpentine’, ‘Isabella's Room’ and ‘All that Good’. In 2023, he launched his first solo work, VAIVÉN, which is now being presented at the CA2M.

PHOTO IG: @bertavicentesalas BERTA VICENTE SALAS

Instagram: @camilo_mejia

JOao

ALL THE STICKS IN THE HILLS. Joao del Monte

This is a concert with voice and piano that displays a banquet of musical influences. The sugar-cane flavour of the largest of the Antilles (Cuba) and the warmth and swing of Andalusia, intertwined with Yoruba songs, provide us with a living experience, a tribute to the music of yesterday and today. Joao del Monte, known as ‘the Gypsy Cuban’, opens up a gateway directly to the soul through his songs.

Joao del Monte came to Spain from Cuba as the lead dancer and star of the musical Hotel Habana Show.

He is one of the most multifaceted artists on the contemporary Spanish Cuban scene. We could list all the art forms in which Del Monte works, but it is better to say that his creative universe draws from music, dance and film resources. He has partnered with a variety of international projects, like his song ‘Carambuko en Subelo’ (Cuba) by the producer Gilles Peterson. He has recently performed with Miguel Poveda in Barcelona’s Liceo opera house and at Madrid’s Botanical Garden, among many other recent appearances.

PHOTO courtesy of the artist

Instagram: @Joao_del_Monte

Picnic Sessions 2024 - Session 3: Supplication - Thursday 13 June

Lopecau

THE GUILTY PLEASURES I HAVEN’T EATEN. Malvin Montero

Lo Pecau que me faltan por comer [The Guilty Pleasures I Haven’t Eaten] offers a collective reflection on the risks of mass tourism and environmental pollution, two ills besieging the Dominican Republic and the Caribbean today. The piece activates sound-based and corporal postcards that combine dembow rap, Zumba and contemporary dance.

Malvin Montero. (Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic). He started studying dance in 2003 at the Alina Abreu Dance Conservatory and has graduated from the Escuela Nacional de Danza de Bellas Artes (Endanza) and Pro Danza (Havana). He has a bachelor’s in Choreography and Dance Interpretation from the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos ISDAl (Madrid). Malvin Montero creates, dances and directs. Trained by the composer Chefa Alonso, his extensive professional career includes classical academic dance, contemporary dance and free improvisation. One of the cruxes of his creative work is reflecting on diasporic corporality and its imaginaries.

PHOTO Abdiel Segarra

Instagram: @malvinstarlin

SAINT FROM AN AUTONOMOUS SUBSTRATE. Inés Sybille

Inés Sybille imagines possible encounters with deities from Haitian voodoo. In this activity, she does it by re-territorialising this religion’s syncretic strategy of survival. Inspired by some of the scenes in the life of the martyr Saint Agnes, the dancer goes out to meet Erzulie, the loa of love, beauty and motherhood, and her multifaceted faces. Might Erzulie be a map and a mirror despite the impossibilities of the diasporic body and the logics of colourism? Based on a dramaturgy impacted by stimuli from the Internet language, the friction between Saint Agnes and Erzulie and the insistence on Kuduro steps from Angola, Vooduness immerses herself in a state in which she can imagine a spiritual conversation.

Inés Sybille Vooduness is a dancer, cultural investigator and teacher. She invents fictitious encounters with deities from Haitian voodoo from her fields of choreography: Kuduro from Angola, coupé décalé from the Ivory Coast and dancehall from Jamaica. As an artist, she shapes this philosophical material and explores the possibility of producing existential awareness by re-territorialising these codes. In 2023, Inés was chosen to be a resident artist at La Casa Encendida with her performance Santa de sustrato autónomo [Saint from an Autonomous Substrate]. She is currently working on a co-production with the Festival TNT and the Teatro do Bairro Alto in Lisbon with her work Simbi en aguas astronómicas.

PHOTO La Casa Encendida/ Estudio Perplejo

MAMISARGASSA 3.0 & AND HER GUESTS. Annabel Guérédrat, Raphaël Gautier and Daniel Dantin

Annabel is presenting a powerful work that has been profoundly shaped by a reflection on ecology and the female condition. This new creation is part of the Ensárgassame series, which explores the burial rituals of a toxic seaweed: sargasso. We are in the year 2083, on a deserted island called Martinique No human, animal or plant has survived after centuries of colonisation, pollution, occupation and tourism. Only the sargasso remains. Mami Sargassa, a new genetically modified entity, has emerged. To stay alive, she buries herself in fresh sargasso. This act of sorcery enables her to be reborn and rehumanised and to give birth to new hybrid beings.

Annabel Guérédrat is an artist, choreographer, performer, ‘witch’ and Caribbean sorceress. Born in New Caledonia, she lives and works in Martinique, where she originally comes from and where she has set up her company Artincidence. She is trained in butoh, Pilates, yoga, ladja, krump and kyudo, a form of Japanese archery somewhere between a martial art and a Zen practice. She is also a practitioner body-mind centering®, a somatic practice that she uses to create organic performances that join the private and the political. She has created figures of modern witches and co-directs the Festival Internacional de Arte Performance, FIAP Martinique.

Daniel Dantin is a musician, drummer and percussionist extraordinaire who comes from a family of musicians. Music has been part of his life since a very young age. At eight, he began to take classes at SERMAC, although he had already started teaching himself. After earning his baccalaureate with a specialisation in music, he joined an arts school in Cuba for five years. After he graduated, he moved to Belgium for five years. He went back to Martinique in 2005 and is now a percussion teacher at SERMAC.

Raphaël Gautier began to play the guitar at the age of nine, initially interested in rock and its variations. In prep school, he leaned towards improvisational music and assembled his first bands. After earning his baccalaureate, he joined the Jazz à Tours school, where he was taught by Antoine Paulin and Guillaume de Chassy, among others. He earned a DEM in Jazz with honours in 2019, and his Rotor project won a composition award from SACEM. In 2020, he joined Pôle Sup’93, where Vincent Ségal and Julien Lourau teach.

PHOTO courtesy of the artist

https://www.instagram.com/artincidence_martinique

Picnic Sessions 2024 - Session 2: Prayer - Thursday 6 June

tELA

SOMETHING IS COMING. Carolina Mendonça and Lara Ferrari

Carolina Mendonça and Lara Ferrari inquire into the notion of violence through writing and muscular rumination. What type of stories are glued to our muscles but could be freed with a bullet? Can our muscles dream about less violent narratives in a crumbling world?

Carolina Mendonça. She has a master’s in Choreography and Performance from the University of Giessen (Germany) and a bachelor’s in Performing Arts from the ECA-USP in Brazil. She undertakes theoretical-practical inquiry that she shares in workshops examining telepathy, levitation, deep listening and other practices. Carolina always builds her works in conjunction with other artists like Catalina Insignares, Marcelo Evelin, Marcela Santander and Lara Ferrari. Her most recent projects are ‘Zones of Resplendence’ (2023), ‘Sirens’ (2021), ‘Pulp- History as a Warm Wet Place’ (2018) and ‘tierra inútil’ (2018), where she and Catalina Insignares invite the public to sleep as they read at night.

Lara Ferrari. She has a master’s degree in Fine, Visual and Spatial Arts: Urban Space from ISAC, Belgium, and a bachelor’s in Choreographic Composition from the UNA, Argentina. Her practice centres on performance and writing as activities that generate states of empathy, vulnerability and fragility in the body. She works with a commitment to think about affects and sensory practices as political tools that enable dissimilar perceptive modes and build other ways of interacting with one another and the environment. Ferrari believes that the imagination is an approach, a way of understanding reality and imagining other realities.

PHOTO Thany Sanches

Instagram: @carolmendonca; @laratumma

Cacao diaz

LLENA DE BABA [FULL OF DROOL]. Cacao Díaz

This is a performative piece that draws from biomythography, the experience of writing and radical transvestite imagination to invite us into the universe of a Caribbean Fem Queen, connecting the runway and siren sex (as an artistic and community practice) with ancestrality, intimacy, catatumbo lightning and the untold fragility of migrant trans lives. Llena de baba both refashions and fantasises about another universe as a method of fleeing the hyper-femininity required of trans-female bodies that provide pleasure.

Cacao Díaz. An Afro-descendant artist, performer and singer who works in different live and performing arts disciplines via the body. With all of these resources, they build stories and vibrations based on their lived experience as a migrant and a trans body. A member of the Tinta Negra collective, they are part of the ballroom scene in Spain and the Kiki House of Laveaux. They connect ballroom culture with affective communities of sexual dissidents and migrants within the Don't Hit a la Negrx collective.

PHOTO Fatima Guariota

Instagram: @cacaodiaz

repentismo

THE COCONUT CAME FROM FAR AWAY—POETIC IMPROV SESSION. Quinny Martínez Hernández (voice), Andy ¡OH! and Diana de La Torre (chorus and percussion)

This specific staging for the CA2M Museum’s Picnic 2024 originated onstage. Carried by drums, it invokes the sacred that engenders a fruit—the symbol of resistance—which attracts the idealisation and assumptions about the Caribbean and other regions just by being named. Its majesty the coconut: it is grated, shredded, chopped, cooked, sweetened, chewed, mashed, aged and spoiled. The coconut lights the flame of the bonfires that cook fears and is drunk to refresh the singing.

Quinny Martínez Hernández. (San Andrés Islas, Colombia, 1979). She lives in Barcelona and is a poet, improviser, creator and coordinator of the publishing project Plataforma Cero, the decolonial writing workshop Hologramas and La FILMIG (Travelling Migrant Book Fair). She is the author of the poetry collections Umami, un corazón erotizado (Diversidad Literaria 2020), Las prostitutas de mi imaginario (El Ojo de Poe 2022) and Salero de Entrepierna (Ultramarina 2024). She is a steadfast believer in the transformative power of art and its different manifestations in order to find a place of expression with a non-negotiable seal of identity.

Andy ¡OH! (Barranquilla, Colombia, 1983). She lives in Barcelona and is a percussionist, singer and composer. Her work is inspired by the traditional music of Colombia’s Caribbean region, while also being influenced by reggae, dancehall and R&B. Between 2014 and 2022, she was the vocalist and composer of Fondo Natural, a music project in which house and cumbia fostered encounters as a political exercise in resistance. She is currently participating in different projects which keep her connected with her roots in her Caribbean birthplace in order to explore the global vision of music and entertainment.

Diana de La Torre (Barranquilla, Colombia, 1984). She lives in Barcelona and is a percussionist, singer and composer. She believes that her best teacher has been the Caribbean through its cultural diversity and musicality. With a 25-year career sharing her voice and percussion, primarily through the power of cumbia, she has had the chance to accompany and learn from important singer-songwriters in the genre like Petrona Martínez and Ceferina Banquez (Qepd) and from artists like Orito Cantora. She is convinced that the music of our ancestors is a spiritual language that connects us with nature and the feelings in our hearts.

PHOTO Carlos Abad

Instagram @erosenguardiapoet

https://erosenguardia.wordpress.com

Picnic Sessions 2024 - Session 1: Rupture - Thursday 30 May

claudia claremi

THE MEMORY OF FRUIT. Claudia Claremi

(AFTERNOON ACTIVITY WITH PRE-REGISTRATION STARTING 15 MAY)

This is a tour around the fruit stands of Móstoles through a sound cartography of La memoria de las frutas [The Memory of Fruit], a project that has looked into Caribbean fruit since 2015 via the web of affects surrounding them.

On the way to the CA2M Museum, with stops and visual interventions at different fruit stands, the experience will be guided by a series of voices from the Spanish-speaking Caribbean islander diaspora who will share memories and reflections on fruit, the land, migration and the quest for flavour. These stories will be accompanied by musical tunes related to fruit.

Claudia Claremi (Madrid, 1986). An artist and filmmaker, she graduated with a degree in Documentary Cinema from the Escuela Internacional de Cine de San Antonio de los Baños (Cuba) and in Fine Arts from the University of the Arts London (United Kingdom). She has been a resident at Beta Local in San Juan, Puerto Rico (2015), the Centro de Residencias Matadero Madrid (2021), the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY (2023) and The Clemente in New York (2023). The grants and awards she has won include Generaciones from the Fundación Montemadrid (2021), Circuitos de Artes Plásticas (2021) and the NOEXPO programme from the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.

PHOTO Claudia Claremi, La Memoria de las Frutas (2023). Image courtesy of the artist.

Instagram: @claudiaclaremi

Orun seco

ORUN SECO - OPENING. Yunieski Gil, Ignacio Calderón and Osikán – creation incubator

The Orun Seco is a sacred sequence played with batá drums to open a wemilere (festival) in Santería. Orun Seco is heard directly by Orishas, heralds the start of the festive ceremony and blesses it with the spiritual and percussive power of the leather drumheads.

Yunieski Gil. He is a percussionist who graduated from the Escuela Nacional de Arte of Cuba. He has played with different musical groups that accompany Afro-Cuban folklore dances, including Sarabanda Ngo, Lucero Cuatro Nsila, the Stild Band of Havana and Yibi Son. He has been a member of the AfroResistences research team at Osikán - Creation Incubator since 2023.

Ignacio Calderón. He is a percussionist with 20 years of international professional experience. He is the former music director of the Afrocuba folklore group of Matanzas and has played with artists like Chucho Valdés and Kervin Barreto (Calle 13). He is an expert in Afro-Cuban, Latin and Afro-Caribbean beats and fusion music (jazz, flamenco, electronic and world music). He is a Latin and Afro-Cuban percussion instructor (United Kingdom, US, Spain, Mexico) and has been a member of the AfroResistences research team at Osikán - Creation Incubator since 2023.

Osikán is an incubator of creation, investigation and action in which artists, experts, activists and communities coexist, fostering critical dialogues and repairing social wounds in our living and working places. Osikán’s origin and most visible track record is in Cuba, within a context of artists working critically on the margins and peripheries of cultural institutions. Today in Madrid, Osikán – Creation Incubator is expanding within a web of alliances with Afro communities, migrants, trans people, racialised people and Afro-Caribbean, indigenous, Afro-descent and Abya Yala diasporas, in connection with other alternative networks of creation and national and international professional circuits.

PHOTO La Casa Encendida/ Estudio Perplejo

Instagram: @osikan_vivero_de_creacion

Euyin

CONUCO PLATABANDA. Sofía Perdomo and Euyín Eugene

Conuco platabanda is a performative dream in which two diasporic bodies intersect. It is an exchange of sensory archives. One nostalgia that talks with another. A tangle which weaves Barlovento, Petare and Madrid together.

Sofía Perdomo Sanz (Caracas, 1995). A migrant, self-managed creator and Caribbean-centred artist of the poetic and the political, she works with what she has and makes this an artistic stance: we do not require anything other than what we already have to express the story we need to tell. She explores using writing, visual art and performance. The recurring themes in her works are memory, the syncretism of Afro-diasporic identities, migration and healing as an essential quest and urge.

Euyín Eugene is a trans man born in Petare, Caracas, Venezuela. He is a visual and stage creator. His work revolves around processes which blend embodied experience and political and social events that condition that experience. The topics he addresses include power relations, migration, gender and historical memory.

PHOTO Euyín Eugene, courtesy of the artist

Instagram: Sofía Perdomo Sanz: @todasvuelven @perrraverde Euyín Eugene: @hanacidoeugene

Afrosideral

AFROSIDERAL LIVE. Kumar Sublevao-Beat alias Afrosideral, Areil Bringuez and Alan Sousa

Afrosideral presents his trio at the CA2M Museum along with the Cuban multi-instrumentalist Ariel Bringuez on sax, keyboard and percussion, and the Brazilian percussionist Alan Sousa. The ancestral songs dedicated to the Orishas and African ancestors are wrapped in contemporary and electronic music, making the concert a ceremony for your body, soul and mind.

Kumar Sublevao-Beat alias Afrosideral. He is a Cuban rapper, music producer and multi-instrumentalist living in Spain. His versatility ranges between hip-hop, jazz, world music and electronic music, all under the mantle of Afro-Cuban music. With a dynamic, mystical and elegant stage show, he goes from downtempo to the most danceable music without losing his authenticity.

PHOTO agnieszkacytacka.fotografia

Instagram: @afrosideral

Facebook: @afroaideral

YouTube: @afrosideral

Website: sublevaobeat.com

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6gwlTwJNBRJ8l8phOAQCEI?si=k3MkCFAlSYqNYU6OaMNoVQ

With the support of

Activity type

Picnic Sessions

Target audience

Anyone interested

Duration

21.00 - 23:00

Dates

30 MAY - 4 JULY

Picnic Sessions 2024 - Session 6: Coronation - Thursday 4 July

Event Date

2024-07-04 -2024-07-04

Picnic Sessions 2024 - Session 5: Manifestation - Thursday 27 June

Event Date

2024-06-27 -2024-06-27

Picnic Sessions 2024 - Session 4: Trance - Thursday 20 June

Event Date

2024-06-20 -2024-06-20

Picnic Sessions 2024 - Session 3: Supplication - Thursday 13 June

Event Date

2024-06-13 -2024-06-13

Picnic Sessions 2024 - Session 2: Prayer - Thursday 6 June

Event Date

2024-06-06 -2024-06-06

Picnic Sessions 2024 - Session 1: Rupture - Thursday 30 May

Event Date

2024-05-30 -2024-05-30

Access

Attendance open and free while places last

DOWNLOAD PROGRAM

More information and contact

912760227

actividades.ca2m@madrid.org

Actividades asociadas

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.

Actividad

From May 26TH to June 30TH

PICNIC SESSIONS 2022. VITAL SUPPORT

At the beginning of the 19th century, The Picnic Society was born in London, an association that met regularly in the open air and in whose meetings each member was expected to contribute part of the entertainment and refreshments without there being a specific host. Based on this concept, and as a Picnic Society, the Museo Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo invites several curators each year to design a program for the Museum's terrace. Every Thursday from the end of May to the end of June, our terrace becomes a space in which we develop a program of activities in which the body and sound are mixed with the educational and participatory.

Performance

27 may – 1 july

PICNIC SESSIONS 2021

As a Picnic Society, the CA2M invites several curators each year to design a program for the terrace of the Center. Every Thursday from the end of May to the beginning of July our terrace will become a space in which we will develop a program of activities in which the physical and the sound are mixed with the educational and participatory.