Activity

We are Nails and Thumbtacks, a little group devoted to artistic experimentation through self-publishing and DIY, always creating through play. We aim to discover and generate multiple ways of materialising our ideas as a group. We explore different media like paper, video, sound, performance and even intangible things, playing with constant constructions and deconstructions.

If you’re between the ages of 13 and 21 and you’re interested in art, this is a space where you can freely experiment. You don’t need any prior knowledge, and you don’t need to be an extrovert; here we invent everything from scratch, together.

This year we’re focusing on transformation to explore what emerges from endings and new beginnings. We’ll invite guests who work in different disciplines like performance, textiles, image and film. We’ll also take trips and appropriate the museum for our creations.

Join us and discover the power of collective creation through play and artistic experimentation.

Ciudad Sur is a space of shared experimentation that was launched in 2021 and aims to inquire into the many facets and riches that generate a sense of belonging in cities around Madrid’s outskirts, taking Móstoles as its point of departure.

In this fourth edition of Ciudad Sur, green is going to take us through different landscapes that that have marked the history of Móstoles and of what Móstoles is not in this and other times. With spectral green, we’ll take leaps through time in each session, which will propose a look at more specific issues in this city south of Madrid while also projecting it on a more global scale and connecting with other neighbourhoods and places in order to share and debate different issues that particularly concern us in this tumultuous political and social context.

In this 2024–2025 edition, the coordinators will once again be: Irene de Andrés, the La Liminal collective and the reporting of Blanca Sotos, accompanied by Estrella Serrano, head of the Education and Public Activities department at the Museo CA2M. Registration will be opened on the website at least 15 days in advance for participation in each session. The sessions are held on Tuesdays from 6 to 8 pm. The dates for this year’s edition are:

• 22 October
• 12 November
• 3 December
• 21 January
• 18 February
• 18 March
• 29 April
• 20 May

Irene de Andrés was born in one of the most popular destinations, the island of Ibiza, which has inevitably led her to inquire into the evolution of the concept of leisure and the very meaning of travel throughout history, from the first colonists to tour operators. Spas, cruise ships and discos are key settings for the artist, who uses films, sculptures and graphic works to create journeys through time and around different waters, connecting different historical deeds that make us reflect on the tourist consumption model, which is especially designed for the working class.

La Liminal is a cultural mediation collective which inquires into the city and uses urban routes as a tool for analysing the public space collectively. Our goal is to experiment with the urban landscape to suggest new interpretations that focus on the stories that have been rendered invisible over time, those that we have not valued, in order to build alternative discourses that are based on collective learning and allow us to reappropriate the idea of public space as a common good.

Blanca Sotos (Madrid, 1978) thinks, reads, writes, translates, corrects, edits and publishes different textualities. She has worked as an editor in ministries, publishers and museums and has directed artbook fairs. She has also taught courses and delivered lectures at the Casa del Lector-Matadero, CA2M Museum, Casa Encendida, Sala Mendoza of Caracas, Centro Nacional de las Artes of Mexico, Centro Cultural de España in Mexico, Tenerife Espacio de Artes, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and the Community of Madrid. She has directed marcablanca since 2018, and she and Ramón Mateos are in charge for the first edition of MiraLookBook, the International Meeting of Publications Specialising in Contemporary Culture. She is currently a professor at American University and is pursuing a PhD in the Faculty of Philosophy at the Complutense University of Madrid.

We are celebrating the arrival of summer on 14 June, and we want to invite you to participate. It will be a kind of celebration where you can remember and enjoy a different kind of evening. We are inviting you to participate in this festival, led by the artists with whom we’ve worked this year in the families project.

We’ll begin with Ángela Segovia and Luz Prado, with whom we’ve created new lullabies in the workshop entitled ‘Donde el tigre se come a los niños’ [Where the Tiger Eats the Children], this time to get mothers to sleep. We’ll close our eyes, and perhaps someone will whisper something in our ear. We may sing or recall the songs from our childhood, or perhaps not because they’ve changed and now there are other songs.

This happened with Ruiseñora in the workshop called ‘Las canciones y los dulces. Mi casa sin patio’ [Songs and Sweets. My House without a Courtyard], in which the popular Spanish children’s song ‘El patio de mi casa’ [The Courtyard of my House] will never be the same again. Now, after the workshops we’ve held, this popular courtyard has a tree that blossoms in the autumn, as well as a Jacuzzi, bologna and pickles.

After that, for dessert, we’ll have De fruta, pastel—we’ll sample the sweetness of dulce de leche, the glazed texture of Portillo pastries and the scent of the honey flowers that flavoured our childhood. And with the aftertaste of so many memories still in our mouths, after dinner we’ll listen to Ruiseñora, who will hold a concert on the museum’s terrace, where her songs will also seem familiar yet different.

• 6 pm Toma mi mamó. Ángela Segovia and Luz Prado. (SUI)
• 6:30 pm De fruta, pastel. (terrace)
• 7 pm Ruiseñora concert (terrace)

Madrid has a long and little-known Islamic legacy which is intertwined with the city’s history in a way that challenges the political and media discourses that present Islam and Muslims as unwanted, recent foreign arrivals. Madrid was founded in the eleventh century with the mixed name of Maŷrit and is the only current European capital with Islamic roots.

Its first history was written in Arabic, as were the names of its first known inhabitants. For 220 years, Madrid belonged to the broad Arab-Islamic geographic and cultural space that extended from the Duero River to the Sahara Desert, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Indus River. After being conquered and incorporated to the Kingdom of Castile in the late eleventh century, Madrid still had an Islamic presence for 500 more years through its Mudejar, Morisco and slave minorities.

This historical legacy is barely known because the history of Madrid has been recounted in light of its status as the urbs regia, the seat and symbolic embodiment of a power that has been presented as essential and exclusively Catholic and European, which has consequently tended to erase the material and symbolic traces of a past that was considered unsuitable. However, unexpected, subtle phantasmagorias of this past, both tangible and intangible, still exist in Madrid today and even inhabit the icons of Madrid’s identity.

This activity suggests a tour around different spaces of memory to engage in a reflection on the history and memory of Madrid in relation to concepts like identity, alterity, mestizaje and diversity.

Wednesday 19 June. 6-8 pm. Free activity with advance registration. Capacity: 25 people.

Daniel Gil-Benumeya, 1970. He was raised between Rabat and Madrid in a family associated with the imagined and cross-border geography of southern Spain. His academic training is in the field of Arab and Islamic Studies, and outside the academy he was trained in the neighbourhood community of Lavapiés and other areas of Madrid. He is currently a professor in the Department of Linguistics and Oriental Studies at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and scientific coordinator of the Centro de Estudios de Madrid Islámico (CEMI), which is affiliated with the Fundación de Cultura Islámica (FUNCI). His main line of research involves a range of issues associated with the past and present of Islam and populations considered Muslim in Europe. He specifically examines the processes of constructing identity and alterity and the role played by social representations of history and memory in this construction.