BUT... IS THIS ART? 2019

This course, tirelessly twirling and entranced, we will continue revolving around doubts and the astonishment induced by the inexplicable: what is art and what is not art. We will take advantage of the fact that we are a little dizzy and we will explore the desire to leave our bodies and our minds and wander. That is, with a lot of emotion and a lot of feeling. We wish to set out on different paths, to examine with awe what we believe we know well and we will go to where we thought (though can we be sure?) we had never been to before. We will let art take us by the hand and we will let ourselves be carried along. To places as close as our own skin, which will be dyed and renewed; as far away as we could possibly imagine, because it is still waiting to be, and besides, does not wish to define itself.

We will make a different kind of contact with what is around us in order to take distance with customs and habits. We feel like losing control. And stretching time and space: an infinite and eternal present and reinvented places it is difficult to return to. And if different when we do return, let it be because we will have known each other in a different way through other things and other people. And now that we no longer look at the world in the same way as when we started, we will understand it better. We will experience life by letting ourselves be carried along by whatever happens and art as something that transforms.

CA2M organises educational activities on contemporary art and thinking that can be framed within the tradition of community colleges, aimed particularly at young and adult students. The courses it offers address some of the key issues for a proper understanding and interpretation of art today, to use it to think. These activities can be divided into two parts: the first consists of the presentation of a theme by a guest speaker and the second part involves a debate open to the audience. But this structure can also change to adapt to more experimental formats depending on the guest at each session.

Directed by Selina Blasco

Aimed at anyone interested in the art of today. No prior knowledge required

23 January

Tatuarot. Whisky and religion

Julio Linares

Whenever it gets a tattoo, the day becomes Sunday. Without a prior conscious decision, tattoo sessions end up as a kind of ritual. A strangely intimate bond is formed through the penetration of ink and metal. The skin is broken, impregnated and changed for ever. And it is this forever-ness that gives everything a certain mystic quality.

It is beautiful to be the vehicle through which the materialisation of the desire of another is channelled. It requires such total concentration that the present takes on absolute splendour.

And with the magic and power of the present, the miracle of transmutation takes place.

Julio Linares. Saga of antiquarians, then a pirate, scientific servant, master of feng shui and painter.

30 January

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Elandorphium

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Elandorphium, xx/xx/xxxx (date unknown) is a body that studies the limits between organic mass and the digital dimension. What is matter and what is artifice?

6 February

art during

Selina Blasco

In art, one is here and there. Are there states of total concentration and isolation when creating? How does one create when one is doing something else? Creating, building, in fantasy, in intoxication, in illness, in care, in waiting, in ecstasy and in tears. We will explore practices that, more than between, are in. Some arise explicitly, but we can look back at others which, in principle, seem to be something else and seem different from another perspective.

We will look for an art of being in two things at once, subversively and pleasurably.

Selina Blasco lectures at the School of Fine Arts at Universidad Complutense.

13 February

A kind of poor stone

Amalia and Luisa

Clay is granite decomposed and disintegrated by erosion.

A friend once said that if I was a stone, I would be a poor brittle kind of stone like sandstone or serpentine, or maybe schist. Or maybe not even rock but clay, or not even clay but earth. I am only earth. I give way. I try to fit in. I am still here and I am still earth, but I am full of footprints and deep holes and traces and alterations.

We want to talk about the world, which is made of earth. To think about material and its processes in order to talk about things. And to talk about ceramics. We have understood some things better after we have touched earth.

About a year or so ago we got together every week in Luisa’s studio in Leganés. We always started by speaking of ourselves, and then we spoke about earth; what it can do.

Amalia currently works at CA2M. Luisa is a self-taught ceramist, active in Adult Learning since the beginning.

20 February

Latino-Futurism

Julián Mayorga

Many immigrants living in Spain ask themselves about the absence of Latin America in dominant futurist imaginaries, and about the value of their community’s cultural practices in art categories. A possible response, from art, could be to focus on exploring tactics of re-invention, resistance/re-existence and re-identification from music and its mise en scène.

We get together to question whether it is possible for these local practices to converse with forms we understand as universal/global, whether it is possible to kick the habit of the modern narrative and to re-inject the enigmatic into our forms of doing and saying; whether we can imbue with importance a new mythology that represents a local landscape and experience.

Julián Mayorga is a Colombian musician and artist based in Madrid; his music spans from sound experimentation to traditional Latin-American music and pop.

27 February

VenidaDevenida

The production of space through dissident practices. The construction of non-normative spaces begins with acts of resistance against dominant structures that create networks of dissidence in the city and which, in many cases, can be mapped.

The queer appropriation of space is one of the clearest examples to demonstrate how the hierarchies of spatial distinction can be distorted, altering preconceived binary ideas that have to do with perceptions of the public and the private, the legal and the illegal, and so on.

The production of space is not just the remit of city planners, architects and builders, but is also the result of social action and cultural construction. Through the study of different dissident practices localised throughout history and their corresponding cartographies, we will demonstrate how users can pervert and generate personal spaces by means of tactics of re-appropriation.

VenidaDevenida are architects and artists.

6 March

Drifts of the self in our environment: walking to explore (ourselves)

Tonia Raquejo

Through a series of practical awareness-raising exercises we will analyse the implications of the experience in the territory, paying attention to how we feel what it is we feel and how we organise the perceptions and kinesic behaviours they generate. Taking this as our starting point, we will analyse how we communicate with our surrounding environs and what kind of mental maps we create, both individually and collectively.

Tonia Raquejo teaches classes in Theories of Contemporary Art in undergraduate degree courses and Theory of Art and Neuro-linguistic Programming in the Master in Art Education in social and cultural institutions at the School of Fine Arts at UCM.

More information at actividades.ca2m@madrid.org  or at 912 760 227