Activity

The Ha-ha is a deceptive mechanism that plays a role in the construction of the landscape. It generates an illusion of breadth and camouflages its real purpose: to control the movements of certain individuals or species. The name ‘ha-ha’ was used for the first time in the 1709 Dezallier d’Argenville book The Theory and Practice of Gardening, in which he explained that the name came from the exclamation of surprise from spectators when they recognised the optical illusion.

When I was asked to lead this tour, the first thing that came to mind was the title: Ha-ha Wall. It was almost an immediate association, perhaps induced by the huge contrast between this term and the immense work that presides over this show: 1,502 people facing the wall. It’s a laughable wall that is not remotely funny. It is a starting point, given that my and Santiago’s work have little in common at first glance. I have used the word ‘ha-ha’, which is a joke in itself, as a way of breaking the ice and beginning an unlikely dialogue between two generations, between two very different ways of approaching artistic production. Contrast again. And the contrast between light and shadow is what allows us to see… although not always. Shadows conceal or reveal, and looking directly at light can blind us. I want to approach this tour positioned from the paradoxes of looking, from the devices of visibility and concealment used to present facts, from the constant suspicion that in everything we are given to see, something remains hidden.

The CA2M Museum’s Education and Public Activities Department has a line of work aimed at developing thematic tours in which artists and creators are invited to discuss the exhibitions with spectators through the lens of their own practices. In this way, we avoid the presumed objectivity of the narratives that the exhibitions offer to instead break with hegemonic discourses. It is a space of inquiry which encourages each person to make their own interpretation of the image and the story in order to use them to generate new imaginaries.

Dates:

• Saturday 14 December 12 pm
• Sunday 15 December 6 pm

Ángela Cuadra inquires into images that discuss concealment techniques used throughout recent history in a broad phenomenological study of invisibility. Based on different sources with pre-existing historical and semantic meanings, she aims to find new layers of meaning in artistic expression. Grounded on collage and approached with intuition, her works are developed in multiple media, ranging installations to video, drawing and expanded painting.

She has held exhibitions at the Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Today Museum (Beijing), Centro del Carmen (Valencia), Sant Andreu Contemporani (Barcelona), Fundación Cultural de Providencia (Providencia, Chile) and Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea (CGAC) (Santiago de Compostela), among others. Since 2013, she has been working on the project space Salón, which she directs with her husband, Dai K S. She is also one of the founders of the first international fair of nonprofit spaces in Madrid, Supersimétrica.

Our migrants’ suitcases are filled with twenty-three kilos of life per crossing. Overweight again? What do you carry when you go? When you come back? Yerba mate to while away the time? Coca leaf to blow on God? How much does a house weigh? Did you squirrel away enough money to bring your dog? Was the skin of the soursop still bristly when you unpacked it? What does your baggage smell like? In these four sessions, we’ll be pulp and seed, green and travel, tenderness and bark to recount the southerly-to-southerly winds that blow over the invented territory of the diaspora. Four encounters to open the soursop (not the melon) and use storytelling to explore the interstices of all our creatures/children.

We invite you to journey through this writing laboratory made up of four interconnected sessions led by Sudakasa: Lucrecia Masson, Gabriela Wiener, Chinî and Hildy Quintanilla Ocampo (Q´inti- Colibrí).

The workshop dates are:

• Friday 29 November 6:30–8:30 pm
• Saturday 30 November 12–2 pm
• Friday 13 December 6:30–8:30 pm
• Saturday 14 December 12–2 pm

Participants must attend three of the four sessions to earn an attendance certificate.

Sudakasa is a community writing and creation space based on migrant experiences; it is a refuge-home and artistic residence that has come to cover our lack of a ‘people’, because our people are across the sea. We have re-appropriated this parcel of olive and almond trees and grapevines from insult and turned it into body, identity and memory of the diasporas so together we can weave other stories of resistance that confront the violences against those from down under.

Lucrecia Masson Córdoba. With impurity as a principle, she is a writer, artist and researcher whose main topics of inquiry are bodies, animalities and other-than-humans. From an anti-colonial stance, she works in different artistic registers, primarily experimenting with writing. What interests her in theory is imagination, and she willingly believes that we cannot think without the body. She published Epistemología rumiante (2017) and Escrituras rumiantes. Cuerpo, exceso, animalidad (2022) and has participated in numerous anthologies. She is a member of the Colectivo Ayllu, with whom she has published Devuélvannos el oro (2018) and participated in events like the Sydney Biennial (2020 and the 35th São Paulo Biennial (2023).

Gabriela Wiener. She is a Peruvian writer and journalist living in Madrid. She has published the books Sexografías, Llamada perdida, Nueve Lunas, Huaco retrato and Dicen de mí and the poetry collections Ejercicios para el endurecimiento del espíritu and Una pequeña fiesta llamada eternidad. Her first stories were published in the narrative journalism magazine Etiqueta Negra. She was a columnist for The New York Times in Spanish and the editor-in-chief of Marie Claire España and has contributed to many international media. She publishes a weekly column for publico.es. She won the National Journalism Award in Peru with a report on a case of gender violence. She is the creator of different performances that she has staged with her family. She wrote and starred in the play Qué locura enamorarme yo de ti. She is a member of@Sudakasa, a collective migrant art and writing project. Undiscovered, the English translation of her novel Huaco retrato, was a finalist for the 2024 International Booker Prize and PEN America. @gabrielawiener

Chinî. She was born in Ka'aguasu, Paraguay, in 1987 during the Alfredo Stroessner dictatorship. She is a poet and marica 108, studied biology and researches frogs and toads from Piribebuy. She migrated to Madrid in 2019, following her mother and sister. She has been a Guaraní Jopará speaker since childhood and adores tereré and mbeju. Professionally, she is currently an arborist and keeps watch over the El Pardo forests in Tres Cantos. She is working on her poetry collection Corpus infecciosa/ 30 comprimidos/ suspensión oral, which examines the wound of HIV-AIDS, migratory sorrow and the traumas of a healthy-ill body. She thinks that the virus has come to her body to rummage through her past and heals it with plant-based remedies. She has been dreaming in Guaraní from the Paraguayan city of Ka'aguasu surrounded by soy harvests and the absence of her mother.

Hildy Quintanilla Ocampo (Q´inti- Colibrí). She is a stage creator, poet, willakuq (storyteller), researcher of Andean theatricalities and oralities and a Qoyllirit’i pilgrim as part of the Quispicanchi nation. In Madrid, she is developing the self-managed Arguedas, Oraliteca Migrante project, which brings Andean and Latin America orality and literature and teaches the Quechua language via Escuelachallay, my little Quechua school in Madrid, as practices that aim to strengthen migrant identities and intercultural dialogue in Spain.

Immerse yourself in this sensory experience that creates a map of memories in dialogue with the Sol Calero exhibition. Memory guides us via the relationship between fruit, their scents, their textures and their flavours, as a fragile, expansive territory where the footprints of our memories reverberate, catalysed by sensory stimuli that summon the latent and its resonances. In this workshop, smell and taste become the thresholds that transport us to encapsulated instants, bringing emotions and experiences suspended time into the present.

We will recreate a group picnic that is offered as an immersion in the personal and collective imaginary, a living tissue in which memory is rewritten based on the direct relationship with the fruit. It is an experience that connects with the artist Sol Calero’s Pica-Pica installation, where we will transform memories into wishes, requests and offerings so we can together imagine possible futures.

Guided workshop for audiences age 6 and over.

Xisela García Moure has been putting agricultural and sustainability techniques into practice in the city for over ten years. A member of the Break the Circle Transition Institute and a resident of Móstoles, she is familiar with our city’s possibilities and interests. An expert in organic agriculture and permaculture, she has worked on different farms and urban agriculture projects, and this year she is aiming to put her knowledge into practice by committing herself to a greener Móstoles that is more aware of the town’s needs.

Dates:

• Wednesday 27 November 6:30–8:30 pm
• Wednesday 4 December 6:30–8:30 pm
• Wednesday 11 December 6:30–8:30 pm

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.