Activity

This workshop will be taking a critical approach to some of the possibilities for creative action that the open spectrum of identity brings to artistic practices today. New subjectivities are beginning to adopt a stance, proudly accepting their abjectness, and this enables them to structure their own discursive fields of action. These empowered attitudes are radically transforming presentation and representation in art.

The workshop will take the form of a walkthrough that explores some of the manifold narrative possibilities afforded by the new visual configuration which has emerged following a shift in identity politics. The journey will follow various paths through art practices in search of the transformation of collective portraits.

A few years ago we started a collaboration project with teachers from the Enterarte group. What started out as a teacher training course here at the museum has grown into a project on education between equals in which knowledge flows from the two parts: the educators at the museum and the school teachers. This is true to the extent that we not only share visits to exhibitions (inside and outside the museum) and artist workshops with Azucena Vieites, the Colektivof collective, Bárbara Fluxá and Fernando Sánchez Castillo; but also, at the same time, Enterarte adds to the activities at CA2M and brings the everyday reality and experience of schools in order to help us grow as an education department.

http://blogenterarte.blogspot.com.es/

Experience-based practices involve a much higher level of learning that those focused on the transmission of given knowledge. That is why, at the end of the academic year we organise a summer workshop for teachers with the goal of exploring the educational potential of action and ways of constructing knowledge that can come from action.

Leave the studio, take over the whole of space, break with the general tone, lower the tension of the opening act, sleep with the doors open, remove a brick from the wall, deactivate a safety protocol, give way to a stranger, darken the path, leave before time, assimilate the outdoor temperature, hang around the rooftops, cut through the forest tonight, bridge the gap, take over a platform, stick your nose into something, increase the flow of a river, lose oneself along the way, tie loose ends, go in the backdoor, put yourself in someone else’s place, don’t do it, lay a bridge, remove the fence from a plot of land, go back home, open a permanent hole, change closed for open, flood the centre, leave the classroom, repeal the rules and regulations, fly to the present… Luz Broto’s proposals often activate unknown dimensions, emphasising exploration as a tool for discovering a given environment and action as a motor for new experiences that approach the individual to the collective.

This workshop proposes working together for a week with all the “ifs and buts” that surround us, those that limit the possibilities for movement in our everyday spaces, in our workplaces, and in our own bodies.

This workshop has been held previously with artists like Los Torreznos, Tania Bruguera, Pere Faura, Itziar Okariz, Norberto Llopis, Nilo Gallego, Dora García and Aimar Pérez Galí.

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Schools are places where forms of interrelating and identity are produced. At times, the classroom is governed by a set of rules based on a binary vision of gender, sex and sexuality that limit any other possibility of being in the world. School is not only a place for transmitting learning, but also a place where we learn what things should be like, and what can and cannot be done. This reality is based on a homogenising and normalising ideology that underpins the space and relationships. How can teachers intervene to question this experience of normalisation and ensure that the classroom is a place where each individual can express him or herself freely?

Conscious of the difficulty and the importance of working with these issues in schools, this year we wanted to convey what we have learned in the queer workshops with students to this space for teachers, and to generate new forms of learning through practice. With the help of queer pedagogy and certain artistic strategies, we will imagine ways of joint construction of a classroom where diverse subjectivities coexist and where sexual, racial, functional, religious and other forms of difference are not viewed as a problem. Staying clear of any form of essentialism that reproduces exclusion and violence, we will address how queerness shows us that the order we have naturalised is not fixed, that our positions change and can be displaced and are full of possibilities.

Minimum of 4 people per group

Aimed at teachers and people interested in education

La Casa is a large, broad, diverse, complex and elaborate project full of ramifications, formats and works, which Aitana Cordero has been working on for the last three years.
 

La Casa is a quest, a deal, an adventure, a disaster of one’s own making, a practice that refutes that “always is never possible.”
 

The intimacy of touching a space and allowing a space to touch you. The art of demolition, the choreography involved in laying foundations, the movement of the bird building its nest, the consistency of ruins. Destruction as a constructive ritual.

This workshop or encounter proposes corporal training around the notion of building and living in togetherness. We will relate these practices to our experience in the classroom or in educational or learning spaces, taking into account not only the “what”, but also the “how.”

We’ll play with notions such as the physicality of building, the creation of spaces, the inhabitable, home, collaboration, intimacy, tiredness, repetition and cooking.

Touching, smelling, moving, studying, questioning, updating ourselves, we will construct and knock down ideas and spaces, as a practice aimed at being together, as a way to recycle a certain hope and create a new meaning of what could be inhabitable.

We’ll ask ourselves these questions

What alternative spaces could emerge from the confrontation of shared wishes and from the action of building and breaking?
Where will that leave comfort, roots, intimacy, sharing?
What if putting down roots were a three-dimensional activity, also in motion?
What if our fluids were able to put together bricks that will later be walls, rooms, buildings, streets, neighbourhoods, cities, countries, continents, worlds, universes, constellations…?
In this workshop we will walk, sweat, dance, build, destroy, invent corners, hideouts, shells and amulets, we’ll taste, there will be silences, hollows, voids, tiredness and many objects.

Aitana Cordero is choreographer, creator, performer and pedagogue. Since 2000 she has been developing her own projects as pieces, installations, performances, choreographies, events, films, videos, texts, cooking proposals, and “things”, which she has presented in many European, North-American and Asian cities. Since 2001 she combines her research and artworks with an intense teaching activity in private schools and universities. She also creates theatre works and “company and observation” in processes of other choreographers or creators. You can find her many universes here: www.aitanacordero.com
 

In previous years we held performance and education workshops with Los Torreznos, Tania Bruguera, Pere Faura, Itziar Okariz, Norberto Llopis, Nilo Gallego, Dora García, Aimar Pérez Galí and Luz Broto.

Two 2-hour sessions, times to be decided with the group

Minimum of 4 people per group

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To meet up, to write, to speak, to read an extract, a sentence, a word, to keep silent, to get up and go to the blackboard, to dither … to think about school once and once again. Then remember that situation and share it. Search for the crossovers between queer and education. Look at the rules, the ones we put in place, and do the opposite …

This year we wish to continue the meetings with teachers we begun last year in order to continue thinking from a practical viewpoint about new ways of imagining the classroom, school subjects and bodies. To keep altering the order we believe to be natural and immutable. To keep imagining new positions.

Aimed at teachers in nursery, primary, secondary, third-level and non-regulated education.

More information on educacion.ca2m@madrid.org / 912 760 225