Activity

Autoplacer, the music and self-publishing festival held at CA2M for the last thirteen years, is back again in 2022, on Saturday 24 September. Like previous years, the Autoplacer/Sindicalistas collective will bring to Móstoles a selection of groups from the underground Spanish scene in an event which has been defending the inclusion of contemporary forms of music in institutions for over a decade, lending visibility to new sounds and their truly independent processes of publishing, production and diffusion.

This year’s event has scheduled punk veterans Sudor, nouvelle garage melodies from Eterna Joventut, Galician energy with Grande Amore, razor-sharp dream pop from Sofía, old-school pop by La Media Distancia and the techno meets post-punk head-on clash of Alfa Estilo from Valencia. And alongside them, making their debut at Autoplacer are EQX, the winners of the Autoplacer 2021 Rough-Cuts competition, with their brand of disruptive avant-pop.

Autoplacer 2022 has also set aside a section dedicated to electronic music curated by Mosul Mosul in which various DJs and a live set will outline a musical path through afrobeat to witch house, passing through dark techno and trance.

Besides there will also be various invited projects in the field of music and editorial self-publishing.

With concerts by:

SUDOR / ETERNA JOVENTUT / SOFÍA / GRANDE AMORE / ALFA ESTILO / LA MEDIA DISTANCIA / EQX (Winners of Autoplacer 2021 Rough-Cuts)

+ DANCEFLOOR WITH MOSUL MOSUL:

UMBRÍA / GARRITA / GOTHIC SANS / ÜVERDRIVER (Live)

Save the date: 24 September, at Museo CA2M!

Admission free until reaching full capacity.

On the occasion of International Museum Day, the CA2M opens on Monday 18th of May, and invites you to get to know the storage areas of the Center with the Museum's Conservation team. The CA2M Collection consists of over 1600 works of art from all artistic disciplines, which are joined by over 300 works by 224 artists from the ARCO Foundation Collection, in deposit at the CA2M since last year. The sum total of both collections constitutes a key set of works in order to understand contemporary creation, since they collect the main trends in art from the second half of the 20th Century until today.

In this temporary encounter in the museum we will create a safe comfort zone where we can visit ourselves. We will visit ourselves from the gazes of others and the empathy that comes from the works on exhibit. We will revisit ourselves from gender, observe our performativity, laugh at ourselves and even transform ourselves. We will move about and we will dance Vogue, even if we do not know how to.

Javier Vaquero Ollero (Toledo, 1984) is a dancer, choreographer, teacher, manager and manual therapist. He is obsessed with the body as an object of study, finicky when it comes to movement and passionate when it comes to dance. He trained in Holland, has lived in different countries, has flirted with voguing, and was a founding member of the House of Tupamaras in Bogota (Colombia).

Art. Education. Pedagogy. Learning. Unlearning. Critical exercise. Political imagination. Wet knowledge. Visionary fictions. Counter-pedagogies. The one thing that we cannot deny, or escape, is that we are contemporaries of our pedagogic processes. And pedagogy, understood as a model, is at once a project for the privatisation of thinking. There are still words that are battlegrounds, and these, more than associated with reason, speak from bodies. Inappropriate, untimely, improper, inconvenient, displaced and angry, they dwell in unease and malaise and are like flows that leak out of all pores.

In this workshop Mônica Hoff, through experimental games, actions and readings, invites us to dwell in the unease we feel with our pedagogic processes and perhaps from there we can boost our individual and collective potential for political and poetic action.

Directed by Yayo Aznar

From March 4 to May 13, CA2M will develop, in conjunction with Mostoles City Council, an introductory course on current art. This course starts a series of activities within the frame of the free universities especially aimed at young and adult public. These courses offer a clear and concise insight into some of the basic concepts for understanding and interpreting current art.

The course will be broken down into one-and-a-half-hour sessions, discussing key themes in current art: from the death of the author, crisis of the subject to the decline of the great narratives and the formation of art as a critical space.

For the second year running, the CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo is offering the But… Is This Art? introductory course on contemporary art. The course will be broken down into 2-hour sessions , with a half-hour discussion on the key themes in current art.

The death of the author, the crisis of the subject, the decline of the great narratives and the formation of art as a critical space are some of the themes that will be addressed by contemporary art experts and CA2M educators over the course of the 11 sessions.

At the beginning of the 1970s the category "art" underwent such a radical change that since then anything can be described as art. Modernity (and its entire aesthetic system with it) came to an unequivocal end. Postmodernity and its new parameters of thought seem to have provided a reasonably appropriate platform from which to take this step. Simply learning to look at artists’ proposals in a different way is an insufficient aim for this course. Beginning to think about these proposals is a more attractive objective: thinking about them from the perspectives of philosophy, politics, aesthetics and personal experience in order to discuss some of the paradigms which, like the death of the author and the crisis of the subject, have been crucial to most of the works and conducts we shall be exploring.

WED 3 MAR

COURSE PRESENTATION

Yayo Aznar. Course director. Lecturer in Art History. Faculty of Geography and History. UNED (National Distance Learning University).

BATTERY OF QUESTIONS. INTRODUCTION TO THE COURSEVictoria Gil-Delgado. CA2M educator.

At this first contact we will use questions to explore contemporary art, examining our role as spectators.

WED 10 MAR
ART CIRCA ‘68: THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR

Joaquín Martínez Pino. Assistant Lecturer in Art History. Faculty of Geography and

History. UNED (National Distance Learning University).

General introduction to the death of the author based on the text by R. Barthes. The death of the author implies the birth of the spectator. The new role of the spectator and the new roles of the artist.

WED 17 MAR
APPROPRIATIONIST ATTITUDES

Carlos Granados. CA2M educator and artist.

A look at some of the projects that include appropriationism. We will discuss the attitudes and methods of appropriationist practices: quotes, samples, inclusion, interpretation, variation, transformation, hybridisation, alteration, deviation, transgression, mutation, etc.

WED 24 MAR
WITNESSES OF THEMSELVES, HISTORIANS OF OTHERS

Miguel Ángel García. Part-time Lecturer in Art History. Faculty of Geography and History. UCM (Complutense University, Madrid).

Since as far back as the Renaissance, artists have played the dual role of witness and historian. Nowadays, there are attempts to reinstate these categories from different viewpoints, adopting a critical discourse on certain occasions and a merely sanctimonious discourse on others. In relation to this situation that has dogged modernity from the outset, we will ask one key question: witness to which event, historian of which processes?

WED 7 APR
DEAD, A THOUSAND TIMES DEAD

Jordi Claramonte. Lecturer in Contemporary Aesthetics. Faculty of Philosophy. UNED (National Distance Learning University). The author is not dead – he is alive and more of a nuisance than ever – and nor is the spectator in a valid position to curse it  – being lacking in all authority to do so. Furthermore, not even the critics and art teachers have a clue which way the wind is blowing. Can we find out?

WED 14 APR
FROM PARTICIPATION TO COLLABORATION

Pablo Martínez. Head of education and public activities at the CA2M. In this session we will examine some of the artistic practices that draw on spectator participation and the development of collaborative pieces to create new ways of confronting and relating to the sensible world. We look in particular at the practices which do not need to reinforce a non-existent social tie or resort to direct action in order to generate new relational methods.

WED 21 APR
FROM CONCEPTUAL ART TO CONTEXTUAL ART

Jordi Claramonte. Lecturer in Contemporary Aesthetics. Faculty of Philosophy. UNED (National Distance Learning University). We will explore the concepts of military tactics, strategies and operations as ways of understanding some of the fundamental changes that have occurred in artistic and social practices since the mid-20th century. New art will propose new forms of operating and will either articulate these socially and politically or – more probably – will continue to fool around for centuries to come.

WED 28 APR
POETICS AND POLITICS, FOREVER FRIENDS?

Yayo Aznar. Course director. Lecturer in Art History. Faculty of Geography and History. UNED (National Distance Learning University). Politics and poetics: the Benjamin/Adorno debate. Benjamin’s reflections on the reproducible work of art. Adorno’s autonomous art and its critical capacity. Different politics and different arts since May ’68. Towards a new definition of aesthetics. Susan Buck-Morss’s aesthetics and anaesthetics, and Rancière’s aesthetic alliance.

WED 5 MAY
DE-FOCUSING TO SEE

Miguel Ángel García. Part-time Lecturer in Art History. Faculty of Geography and History. UCM (Complutense University, Madrid). That which we call art, not without a certain prestige, has been structured for many centuries as a focused structure. In other words, as something that is seen and should be seen clearly, without any optical aberrations or visual residues. In the west, sight has functioned in the fashion of a well-oiled machine, that neither tires nor breaks down. From Velázquez to Monet and situationism, we will address the physiological drifts that the eye is always so pleased to engage in.

WED 12 MAYBUT WE ARE MANY OTHERS: FOOLS
Yayo Aznar. Course director. Lecturer in Art History. Faculty of Geography and History. UNED (National Distance Learning University). The “others” in us. Foucault’s reflections on the subject and power. The construction of madness through its representation. The crisis of a definition: Tony Oursler, Frances Torres, Juan Muñoz…

WED 19 MAY
AND THIS IS ARCHITECTURE?

Jesús López. Assistant Lecturer in Art History. Faculty of Geography and History. UNED (National Distance Learning University).
Where do people go at weekends? In fact, thousands of people flock to shopping centres and sports complexes. And yet, if you look at architecture magazines or the great books on the subject, you will find that these spaces are non-existent for critics and historians. Although almost a century has passed since concepts such as beauty were banished from the visual arts and now any object is worthy of being admitted to the plastic discourse, this has not occurred in architecture. Fortunately, people build cities without listening to the critics, and we will revisit them aided by revived situationist texts.

DIRECTED BY YAYO AZNAR

The notion commonly built around current art and its creators usually appears as linked to the discourse spread by mass media. Therefore, it is perceived as a legacy of a romantic ideal and modern paradigm which conceive art as autonomous. But artistic production created under aesthetic and thought paradigms since post-modernity has given up on the autonomy of the artistic object and is starting to look beyond the traditional conception of Art: it is related to its environment and deals with other current actors to build a discourse. 

In Looking at the present. Seven sessions to think about current art, we will have theoreticians and artists analysing, along with some of their proposals, subjects that affect in depth the way we perceive ourselves in the late-capitalist context: our shared past, our role as spectators-citizens, the way we relate with authority or the influence of the institutions on ways of life are only some of the debates’ starting points. This way of thinking with objects and art images may be the only possible approach to find out about its dialectical capacity as well as its capacity for agency. So that, in the end, we’ll see the way art lives amongst us as a manner of looking critically at the present. 

The CA2M offers a number of training activities in contemporary art and philosophy as part of its public education programmes specifically designed for young people and adults.These courses offer a clear and concise insight into some of the basic concepts for understanding and interpreting contemporary art. The activities are divided into two parts: the first part consists of the introduction of a theme by a guest speaker, who in the second part opens the floor to a discussion involving the participants.This seven-session course will be completed by a tour to the exhibition Before everything.

WED 20 OCT
Course Presentation and Introduction
Pablo Martínez. Head of Education and Public Activities.
Ferran Barenblit. CA2M director

WED 27 OCT
Yayo Aznar, PhD in Art History, is currently teaching as a tenured professor in the Art History Department of the UNED University in Madrid.
Amongst her publications, some books like El cauce de la memoria. Arte en el siglo XIX (Madrid, Istmo, 1998), Arte de acción (Madrid, Nerea, 2000), La memoria pública (Madrid, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, 2002), El Guernica (Madrid, Edilupa, 2004) or La memoria compartida. España y Argentina en la formación de un imaginario cultural (Buenos Aires, Paidós, 2005) are particulary worth pointing out. In addition, she is co-manager with Javier Hernando Carrasco of the collection Arte Hoy, published by Nerea’s publishing company.

WED 3 NOV
Dora García (Valladolid, 1965) is an artist focused on dismantling conventions and codes of conduct in particular those between the artwork, the artist and the spectator by use of performance, or an unusual treatment of the exhibition space.

WED 10 NOV
Pablo Marte (Cadiz, 1975) works with videos playing with its fictionality and facing it to reality. In his work, we can also sense a political concern captured by his treatment of the relation between body and space.

WED 17 NOV

Since the mid-sixties, Isidoro Valcárcel Medina (Murcia, 1937) is a conceptual artist who has been questioning, through his work, the status of the artwork and its aestheticized value as well as the institutional frameworks where it takes place. His practice goes from experimental poetry, music and mail art to film, performance or sound intervention.

WED 24 NOV
Fernando García (Madrid, 1975) works intentionally mixing formats to deal with different concerns related to his personal experience and condition of artist. As a matter of fact, his pieces refer ironically to contradictions on the contemporary creator position and the structures of the art world.

WED 1 DIC
David Bestué and Marc Vives (Barcelona, 1980 and 1978 respectively) collaborate as artists since 2002. Their work consists of incisions on quotidianness through fictional elements using a plurality of references on art history as well as philosophical or popular culture. 

Educational programme 2010 - 2011