Activity

Since its inception, the Roof Terrace Garden was conceived as a space with a mission to go much further than a simple organic agricultural school, and with the goal to build a community. Today that challenge is more pressing than ever, and for this reason we need to open up our horizons and underscore the need for a direct practice of sustainability in cities, reinforcing concepts like grow-your-own, self-sufficiency, DIY and kilometre-0 production, incentivizing a culture of proximity.

Cities are a big drain on resources. They have to import almost all their needs and are highly vulnerable to the challenges thrown up by the growing and now palpable environmental crisis. But cities are also a source of opportunities if you know how to make the most of their potential. Our current model for cities came into being under a set of parameters that no longer make sense for the twenty-first century. It is up to us to take stock of the situation and to change the model towards one more aligned with the needs of our decade. During the year of 2023, we will focus on the possibilities that cities can offer, with the goal of raising awareness among the wider community and to equip ourselves with the tools to understand our surrounding environs and transform it.

For this big challenge ahead, we are bringing on board the experience and collaboration of the Instituto de Transición Rompe el Círculo (Break the Circle Transition Institute) whose activity over the last decade has been focused on sustainability in cities, taking Móstoles as a groundbase for experimentation. With this purpose in mind, the Roof Terrace Garden now becomes the Community Sustainability Laboratory.

PROGRAMME 2023

Thursday 2 February 11:30-1:30 pm. Introduction to gardening in terraces. A roof terrace offers lots of possibilities no matter how small it is. In this workshop we will take a look at some of the new tendencies in organic agricultural we could apply in our terraces, overviewing all the various methods of agro-organic farming.

Thursday 9 February 11:30-1:30 pm. Preparation of seedbeds and growing crops in greenhouses. The creation of our own seedbeds is a simple technique we should learn to begin our own vegetable garden from scratch and how to accommodate the new plants into our available space. In addition, growing crops on a roof terrace has the advantage of making the most of a nearby space with a regular temperature which is higher than the general outside temperature at this time of year, thus allowing us to bring forward planting and growing to ensure a crop of early spring vegetables.

Thursday 16 February 11:30-1:30 pm. Designing a roof terrace vegetable garden. We will learn to make the most of available space in all directions, understand the plays of light and shadow and use them in our favour to obtain the greatest possible production in the least space possible. Vertical gardens, microclimates, direction, materials.

Thursday 23 February 11:30-1:30 pm. Growing in pots. A terrace is an artificial growing area but this should not prevent us from growing natural vegetables. With a good substrate and the right pots, we can plant whatever we like.

Thursday 2 March 11:30-1:30 pm. Companion planting. A good way of being able to grow the greatest number of plants in the least space possible is to learn to plant different crops in proximity and tips to grow with less space between plants than normally recommended.

Thursday 9 March 11:30-1:30 pm. Irrigation systems for terraces. The choice of a good watering method is crucial for the success of our crops. We will show you how to choose the best system for your little vegetable garden in such a way that we will use the least amount of water possible while ensuring that our plants get all the moisture they need. Irrigation systems, watering cans, gravity irrigation, self-watering.

Thursday 16 March 11:30-1:30 pm. Spring planting. In this workshop we will address the planting of vegetables we had previously prepared in seedbeds and we will learn to plant both with root ball and with direct sowing.

Thursday 23 March 11:30-1:30 pm. Preparing remedies and preventive measures against plagues. The fact of living in a city does not free us from the typical plagues that affect plants. We will learn to prevent attacks and prepare remedies and liquid fertilisers for our plants.

Thursday 30 March 11:30-1:30 pm. Companion planting in organic gardening. Companion plants are those that help us, among other things, to attract pollinating insects. This is even more necessary in cities due to the scarcity of auxiliary fauna.

In addition, at the end of the month of March, CA2M will host a plant cutting exchange for the third time. This year, besides exchanging indoor and outdoor plants, we will be carrying out a kokedamas workshop after which you will be able to take your new plant home with you, ready to go into its chosen place.

A star enters twilight when, due to the effect of the rotation of the planet, it crosses the plane of the horizon and passes from the visible to the invisible hemisphere. In the case of the Sun this marks the end of the day. Sunset is a pale tint of orange. A completely imprecise and ambiguous representation of colour that happens fleetingly during twilight. The first use of sunset as the name of colour dates back to 1916.

In this brief meet-up at the museum we are going to create a space for leisurely contemplation. We will take a slow walkthrough enlivened with stories about colour, the work of Mitsuo Miura and actions that happen with light. Over the course of the visit, we will look more intently, we will try to stimulate our pupils in order to perceive differently and we will talk a lot, an awful lot, about colour. We will take a tour of the museum through its spectrum of colours, we will submerge ourselves in its light and the geometries, and we will go up to the roof terrace at the exact time to contemplate the mysterious colour of the sky at the moment when the sun disappears from Móstoles.

Agustín Pérez Rubio, co-curator of the exhibition, invites us to join him on a tour to discover and talk about the various layers of the work of the US-Chinese artist Martin Wong.

On this guided walkthrough with the curator we are invited to participate and revisit a particular time and place that were seminal for the social relations of class, race and sexual orientation in the USA in the 1980s and 90s especially in the area of New York City known as Loisaida and its social reality of criminality, street culture, graffiti and drugs.

Wong proffered himself as a vehicle to open up the debate on the representation of sexual and cultural minorities in art, particularly the Asian and Latino minorities in the USA.

We will glean an insight into “the Bad Chinese” as he called himself, through an analysis of the sociological and political aspects of his work, and, in doing so, underscoring the transfer of language to the medium of painting, the complex mesh of multiple cultures, his interest in systems of language and the symbolism of the people he portrayed.

If you accept the invitation we will share impressions and resonances with our own experiences.

DATES

• 10 December at 5:30 pm
• 17 December at 5:30 pm
• 7 January at 5:30 pm
• 14 January at 5:30 pm

Prior enrolment by ringing (+34) 91 276 02 21 or by email ca2m@madrid.org

Cities are responsible for the emission of 75% of all greenhouse gases. But cities are also at the forefront of the most far-reaching transformations to make sustainability a reality. To counteract ecoanxiety, the best remedy is putting into practice practical measures. To discover the kinds of actions that are already being implemented in other places. And to borrow inspiration from their experience. In this cycle of four workshops we will overview the main proposals coming from cities all over the world to fight the environmental crisis and we will take action by imagining, with pragmatism but also with poetry, a Móstoles where we can live happily within the limits of our planet.

PROGRAMME

• Tuesday 13. The city and sustainable food: growing food in the city.
• Wednesday 14. The city and sustainable energy: cooking with free energy from the sun.
• Thursday 15. The city and sustainable mobility: a three-in-one in rights.
• Friday 16. The eco-social revolution shall be urban or it shall not be.

This cycle of workshops is organized in collaboration with Instituto de Transición Rompe el Círculo [Break the Circle Transition Institute], a collective from Mostoles with plenty of experience in community sustainability projects, creating new imaginaries on new models of society and putting into practice some of their ideas.

Among the most notable projects in this line of action are the Roof Terrace Garden workshops at CA2M (2013 - 2021), the Hammockdrome at Finca Liana park (2018) and the exhibition Será una vez Móstoles 2030, plus a series of conversations and debates like Oil-free Móstoles (2012) or Transition Picnics (2015-2016). This cycle features input from two of its members: Emilio Santiago Muíño (climate anthropologist and researcher at CSIC) and Xisela García Moure (expert in agroecology and movement in transition).

Like a damp stain on the bathroom ceiling, this year Les Sin Nombre are back again. We are going to appropriate the museum waste to create termite nests.

We are going to inhabit, occupy and squat the crack as a place to take refuge, that will allow us to make out way inside, to infect the walls through actions and conversations as sticky as our hands after eating a gigantic ice-cream.

LSN is an activity for young people from the ages of 13 to 21 years in which we will explore new forms of relating with contemporary creation. An open collective space in which to investigate artistic strategies based on DIY methods using whatever we have at hand.

Throughout the various sessions, we will work on the critical construction of objects, images and actions, exploring our personal universes and searching for new ways of looking at everyday life. Together we will build the museum that we want to see, a place where we can chat, sing, show our drawings, sunbathe … Using the waste material thrown out by Museo CA2M (the remains from mounting exhibitions, workshops, activities, etc.) we will build a museum within the museum, like a parasitic organism.

Luisempar is a curatorial collective made up of Empar Polanco (Valencia, 1996) and Luis San Gregorio (Aranda de Duero, 1996), focused on research into performative action and its recording.

Museo CA2M in partnership with Visual AIDS present Day With(out) Art 2022 by presenting “Being & Belonging”, a programme of seven short videos highlighting under-told stories of HIV and AIDS from the perspective of artists living with HIV across the world.

The programme presents recently commissioned work by Camila Arce (Argentina), Davina “Dee” Conner and Karin Hayes (USA), Jaewon Kim (South Korea), Clifford Prince King (USA), Santiago Lemus and Camilo Acosta Huntertexas (Colombia), Mikiki (Canada), and Jhoel Zempoalteca and La Jerry (Mexico).

From navigating sex and intimacy to confronting stigma and isolation, Being & Belonging centres the emotional realities of living with HIV today. How does living with HIV shift the ways that a person experiences, asks for, or provides love, support, and belonging? The seven videos are a call for belonging from those that have been stigmatized within their communities or left out of mainstream HIV/AIDS narratives.

The seven videos will be screened in loop uninterruptedly all day at SUI (Infinite Uses Hall, ground floor) at Museo CA2M, admission free.

Curated by:

Aimed at secondary school students, this visit-workshop focuses on the act of painting, and more specifically on thinking about colours. If you give them time, colours become mysterious. Many of them came about initially as pigments for artistic painting; sometimes their names refer to the geographical regions where they were first used or found, or to the minerals and chemical substances used in their composition.

The names for colours vary depending on cultures and people: it could be the case that the same name for a colour might suggest a different shade to people from different countries. In addition, some have a very precise and unambiguous definition, while others only give vague hints. We can see, for instance, that the sky above Móstoles at 2:26 pm today is Móstoles blue, Thursday blue or sky grey. But that is not exactly it either.

One thing that strikes us as fundamental in Mitsuo Miura’s work is his way of looking at his surroundings, of noticing all the minute changes. Colours, but also humidity, shadows and the weather are all raw material to construct by using what is available to us and to expand the world we think we see.

Discover more about the exhibition  Mitsuo Miura. Almost 400 m² for Two Landscapes.

Enrol with your class HERE.