Activity

Architects of Silence is a sound and musical journey that begins with a family building activity and leads to relaxation and listening. It is wordless building, a refuge against noise. Our journey will be accompanied by a soundscape created live, which invites us to relax and listen not only in the literal sense but also to pay attention to our children and perceive them from a new perspective.

This activity is designed for families to enjoy together, no matter the age. It is part of our family programme in which guest artists share their experiences and creative practices with us. Grandmothers, siblings, neighbours… you’re all welcome! We at the CA2M Museum want to offer a space where you can disconnect from your daily routine. Here, there are no adults that know more than children, who only obey; instead, we explore together, creating a corner where we can curl up and leave behind the roles we play at home.

Happy travels!

NOTE: This activity is recommended for people aged 3 and up, so they will have priority as the places are taken. However, if there is anyone under 3 in your group, they are welcome.

Tania Arias Winogradow

Performing artist, dancer, choreographer and mother. She creates devices that provide creative tools around play, movement and dance. Her projects invite us to fine-tune our listening through the sensitive body and to deploy each person’s potential for movement, enabling us to better interact with our environment. She has partnered with and participated in spaces like the Museo Reina Sofía, La Casa Encendida of Madrid and the Inspiration Persona collective. She has been investigating different languages within the live arts for over 25 years.

PROGRAMME

OCTOBER

• Saturday 19 from 4:30 to 6:30 pm
• Saturday 26 from 11 am to 1 pm

NOVEMBER

• Saturday 9 from 4:30 to 6:30 pm
• Saturday 16 from 11 am to 1 pm

This year, in the CA2M Summer Cabin, we spent four unforgettable days playing at being fish. We moved and danced in our own coral reef, the museum, and without realising it we turned into mute butterflies that dreamed when they were moving. We asked such curious questions as: Can a grandmother be a professional dancer? Can we dance in a museum? If we stay still, will we be dancing? These questions stayed with us and are still inspiring us.

This is why we decided to continue this adventure throughout an entire school year with this extracurricular activity. We’re going to keep playing and moving like animals to explore these and many more questions. Imagine everything you can discover and create in one year if fifteen fishes can turn into butterflies in just four days!

We are beginning with investigating our bodies and all the possible ways they can move.  We’ll dance together, with time and space, and we’ll create a place of artistic expression enriched by the group’s generational diversity.

The activity will be led by Alba Sáenz-López Aumente and Mar Sáenz-López Aumente. They are dancers, choreographers, sisters, cultural mediators and founders of the Baiven collective, an organisation that uses dance to foster the horizontal exchange of experiences, perspectives, knowledge and critical thinking. They develop exploratory activities around the performing arts and education. They seek engagement and interaction with communities and regions and try to expand the professional field of art by creating accessible, diverse spaces where anyone fits, no matter their situation, body or mind.

Some time back, the artist Jorge Satorre had the chance to enter a fascinating space within a factory. Invited to develop a project there, after hours of exploration his attention was drawn to a place that the employees called ‘the darkroom’. For more than twenty years, this space had been used as a repository of moulds and tools that had been discarded or replaced by more precise, productive ones. It was a hidden museum of objects that are equal parts obsolete and valuable, an archive of the factory’s unofficial history.

Jorge’s project reminds us of those spaces in schools that store objects and tools that were used in the classrooms at some point but have now been replaced or thrown out: overhead projectors, technical drawing tools, art supplies, old computers and screens… all inventoried and stored, awaiting an uncertain fate.

What do these collections of discards tell us about the productivity of educational spaces? What stories do these hidden places harbouring what was once useful tell us?

This class began by inviting the artist Jorge Satorre to hold a performance and education workshop targeted at teachers, educators and artists interested in education. For one week, we’ll work together to tighten our bonds of collaboration and reflect together on the performativity of education, on what we keep, what we get rid of and what this says about us.

We suggest joining together in a process of inquiry and collective action. We’ll visit those strange spaces, inventory them, reclassify them and, by doing so, try to go further. The goal is not only to rediscover what has been forgotten but also to understand what all of this reveals about our own educational processes and how we value knowledge and creativity.

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.

To mark the occasion of its 15th anniversary, on 4 and 5 May the CA2M Museum is hosting FURIA, a Live Arts Festival whose first edition will bring together traditional flamenco and contemporary performance art.

The CA2M Museum will become a space for the creation and exhibition of the performing arts, mixing popular culture with contemporary art. 

FURIA celebrates the museum’s entry into maturity on its 15th anniversary, without losing any of the youthful strength, boldness and the enthusiasm for which it is known. The museum has invited leading artists to create performance art pieces that will be premiered at this festival.

PROGRAMME

• THURSDAY 4 MAY. 8PM TABLAO. An installation by Ernesto Artillo for the flamenco troupe: Yerai Cortés, Niño de Elche, Andrés Marín and Rocío Molina.
• FRIDAY 5 MAY. 8PM UNO. Claudia Pagès. With Nora Haddad and nara is neus.

Interdependence is at the very groundbase of our most everyday reality. Marina Garcés contends that “you cannot say I without an echo of us”, but it is a singular us—not ‘all of us’ but rather ‘each one of us’. We are increasingly bombarded by the fantasy that it is possible to live in isolation, but, not only that, that this life in isolation is livable. Political discourses, economic dynamics, ways of life, routines, slogans and individualist aspirations hold sway. And even though the lesson that we need each other can be gleaned from the extreme circumstances we have lived through and from everyday reality, the dominant narratives are different.

Coexistence has been smothered by survival.

Interdependence, and its manifold expressions, is the common thread running through these picnic sessions: ranging from our relationship with nature to work relations. The role of the public is crucial to reach the level of euphoria needed to generate the sensation of community, the sense of belonging that I, you and we all look for in a family, a rave or a union.

Interdependence comes about from the undeniable vulnerability that we all share in common. To bring this reality to light, the hierarchical relationship between audience and artists will disappear in the sessions when creators openly reveal their precariousness, endemic to the cultural industry, exposing the hidden underbelly of their life stories, a kind of in bio veritas that speaks of hand-to-mouth jobs and the difficulty if not directly the impossibility of making a living from art. In addition, the bureaucratic, administrative and fiscal demands required to take part in certain cultural spaces are major obstacles for creative practice. To circumvent and shatter them, mutual support is, as always, the most effective instrument at hand.

More than just participating, the audience becomes one with the music and performances, it is invited to reach out and touch each other blindly, to make exchanges on the sidelines of the economy or to take stock of their privilege with regards those who society categorizes as dependents, as if the rest of us were not.

These Picnic Sessions are an invitation to make the most of these bonds, and to create new ones. With euphoria.

Curated by: Nerea Pérez de las Heras and Mar Rojo.

// At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Picnic Society was founded in London and met regularly in the open air. On its outings, which had no specific host as such, the individual members were expected to provide the refreshments and the entertainment. Starting out from the same concept, and forming its own particular Picnic Society, every year CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo invites various curators to design a programme for the art centre’s roof terrace.

Every Thursday from the end of May until mid-July the CA2M roof terrace will be transformed into a space where we will carry out a programme of activities mixing the body and sound with education and participation. //

PROGRAMME

• Thurs 26/05 I IF YOU MOVE, I MOVE Miss Beige, Dembooty

• Thurs 02/06 I OUTSIDE THE NORM Costa Badía, LVL1

• Thurs 09/06 I INTERDEPENDENTS Ana Matey, Maricas: Jovendelaperla & Berenice

• Thurs 16/06 I A SINGLE BODY Ernesto Artillo, Ece Canli

• Thurs 23/06 I NEW PIECES, NEW GAMES Andrea Jiménez, Caliza

• Thurs 30/06 I MELT, MIX, STIR Victória Bemfica, Emily da Silva, Gabriela Clavería and Ikram Bouloum

SCHEDULE: 9:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. (EXCEPT THE SESSION ON THE 30TH, WHICH WILL BEGIN AT 6:00 p.m.).

YOU CAN DOWNLOAD THE PROGRAM HERE

This course’s educational activity programme is oral. If you are interested in this activity, write to us at educacion.ca2m@madrid.org or call us on 912760227 and we’ll tell you all about it.

You can sign up HERE

This project is part of the series of language workshops by the A.C. Banda Editorial Silvestre. Organised by  BOYA_~célula  in collaboration with Seminario Euraca.