Activity

“We’re back. We’re going to continue what we left unfinished and this time transform ourselves. We come as lost Amazons. Echoing in the air are the mythological polyphonies that generate this system of unequal relationships, those voices, symbols and images that don’t represent us. The narrative has been so, so, so successful that we’re still pushing the Boulder.

We wanted to kill the mother but we failed, so now we're going to save her. We might not achieve that goal either, but this time we’ll aim better. Although in our attempts to adapt ancestral myths to the new identities of the twenty-first century we might miss Diana’s mark.

Here, there and everywhere, through the centuries, they've stolen our narrative, even though it was all chaos in the beginning. Our journey has brought us to IthaCA2M. We're going to shut Telemachus’s mouth, we’re going to appropriate mythos for ourselves. Potatoes protest by whistling in the cruelty of the kitchen. Because now we know we’re either mad or bad, really bad or super-bad, or good, really good without nuances, one-dimensional. 

At our next meetings we’ll explore and interrogate the role of myths in every sense and in every aspect. We’ll reflect on the narratives that have shaped the construction of female subjectivity to challenge them and rebel against them. Magicians and priestesses, fiends, old women who used magic potions and spells, frequented cemeteries and could even fly. Persecuted and punished: was the imposed narrative in danger?

For witches Circe and Medea. Men’s fantasies, for good or for bad. Powerful witches, negative models for women’s conduct who also represented the antithesis of the chaste woman. Penelope would weave and un-weave, create and un-create. And so do we. We fall so often into the stereotypes that we hate and envy Helen.

Our Trojan Horse for destroying this imaginary will be literature and art, sister allies, the tools we’ll use to unravel ourselves. We’ll make room for popular traditions, other forms, in truth to explain the same thing. We’ll open Pandora’s box, or just for change we’ll leave Pandora free of boxes. The Apple is very good for whitening your teeth. We’re the mixture, result, product of Celtic, Roman and barbarian lands. Dehumanised, de- and human, perfect and imperfect, although they’ve screwed us alive and even dead. But from the mud new narratives have emerged with different voices and different airs. And we’ll (re-) embrace them to discuss and listen to each other in the midst of sounds, words and silences.”

The Daughters of Jocasta

PS. Jocasta committed suicide whereas Oedipus only gouged out his eyes. How unfair it all is. We put up with so much.

Who are we? The Daughters of Jocasta.

We’re called the Daughters of Jocasta because we like the name, because we’re all daughters, and because Jocasta was the mother (and wife) of Oedipus, who gave her so much pain (and pleasure).

We found the excuse for the name in Christiane Oliver's book The Children of Jocasta and appropriated it. It’s ours.

Four daughters: Rebeca Contador, Sandra Cabrera, Ángela Solano and Ana Isabel Fernández Álvarez.

We're the resistance of the Museo CA2M reading groups. But we've become more than the origin, we have our own voice. United by a love of talking and talking, of always mulling everything over from every angle.

NEXT SESSIONS

30 October

13 and 27 November

18 December

Going out on to the street to propose practices that alter the logical order of things; sticking chewing gum on the museum entrance to create a collective sculpture with the fingerprints of the all students; hanging their own flag on the museum facade (if only for a minute); and inventing ranges of colour to reconstruct the Móstoles landscape at precisely 12.30 noon.  

These are just some of the experiences in which students who have visited the Museo CA2M have engaged.  

During the school year we propose an experience for secondary and upper secondary students that will turn the museum into a space for creation, investigation and collective thinking.  

This year the activities will revolve around the Murky Waters exhibition by Inês Zenha, their first institutional solo show in Spain. Zenha explores queer identity, desire and vulnerability through installations, paintings and sculptures that invite us to rethink the body, fluidity and power structures.  

With this same focus, we have invited the artist Aicha Josefa Trinidad Gououi to help us design strategies to activate the exhibition spaces and generate meaningful experiences with the students. The aim is to establish a direct link between contemporary artistic practices and young people, encouraging critical thinking and discussion about topical social and cultural themes.  

What do we propose?  

• An encounter inspired by the desire to share knowledge, practices and experiences.  
• A space to imagine other ways of being together.  
• An opportunity to turn the museum into a laboratory, a stage, a shelter.  

Aicha Josefa Trinidad Gououi is a researcher and artist. Her work explores how first-person writing and lived experiences can become forms of knowledge. 

“Out of the mud... these seams” is a morning workshop at the Museo CA2M where we invite groups of pre-school and primary school children to come and share stories connected to other forms of knowledge and transmission, using experiences they already practise: gestures, listening, play, telepathy, imagination, dreams...

The stories are shared in the workshop without the need for words. Sometimes they emerge in the form of stitches, sometimes in gestures or silences. The children explore ways of learning and remembering that are not always taught but are felt. The workshop and the exhibition space are a place to come together, imagine and listen with the body, a place where the ordinary is transformed into the extraordinary, and art emerges without anyone naming it.

Adriana Reyes (anthropologist and creator in the living arts field) and Gregoria Batalla Batalla (teacher at the infant school Zaleo, History of the Americas graduate and revolutionary in the art of educating) know a great deal about all of this, which is why we’ve invited them to design this workshop in which the children will turn something small into a new creation; where the body, collective action and other contemporary art forms will be harnessed to create something wonderful out of something small.

“Dancing the neighbourhood”, held every Tuesday evening at the Museo CA2M, is conceived as a permanent meeting space for children, a little community where the ordinary becomes special, where every gathering is an opportunity to discover something new along with other people, a feel-good place in which to explore through the body and movement. 

Last year, children between the ages of 6 and 12 participated in a creative adventure that took them to different parts of the museum... and the city! As well as exploring works by artists such as Sol Calero, María Medem and Santiago Sierra, they went to places like Avenida de la Constitución, Parque Cuartel Huertas and Plaza del Pradillo.

During the sessions, they engaged in body play, designed spaces, created dance scores and recorded an audiovisual experience to discover different forms of dance in Móstoles.
All of this movement prompted multiple questions that continue to energise the project:  Where can dance be found? Who can dance? How can we document our own dances? What do we learn when we dance?

This year we want to go on exploring, opening up new routes and looking at the place where we live with different eyes. Using body play, time and space, we’ll design major choreographic expeditions to imagine and share new ways of dancing together.

The activity is led by Alba Sáenz-López Aumente and Mar Sáenz-López Aumente, dancers, choreographers, cultural mediators and founders of Baiven, a collective that uses dance as a form of cultural mediation and is committed to the horizontal sharing of experiences, perspectives, knowledge and critical thinking. 

You can sign up at any time during the school year.
Places are subject to availability, but we’ll be delighted to welcome you if there are any vacancies.

Just like the end of every school year, we are looking for a special way to kick off the summer. This year we’re inviting the artist Sara Manubens, who will suggest that we collectively create our own House Drag over the course of four days.

‘This workshop uses the tools of the art of drag as creative power for working with ourselves. I am suggesting an open, sensitive space where all bodies, concerns, fantasies, fears and illusions have a place, with the goal of sharing. We want to share who we are, who we want to be, what makes us uneasy and what we reject. And we will transform all of this into artistic material. How? Through drag art technologies: lip syncing, choreography, exaggerated theatre, makeup, humour and vibrant emotions. We’ll do it through friendship and being together, because that is House Drag: a horizontal space of mutual support to make life happier.’

This summer, the museum is turning into a space designed to combat the heat just like it’s always been done: where it’s cool, with no hurry and in good company. Inspired by those perennial places where idleness is fine, this project is turning the museum into a summer refuge where you can simply exist.

La Fresquera is a place where time stands still a little, where you can come read, play cards, talk… or simply do nothing. A place where the cool air is appreciated, like when you used to sit in your doorway in good company with a pitcher of water next to you.

La Fresquera isn’t an activity; it’s an attitude. It’s opening the museum’s doors to turn it into that courtyard, square or porch where you love to be. We’ve prepared a series of comfortable, quiet spaces full of plants where you can feel at home.

We care for your plants. Watering Can Initiative

We know that many people go on holiday in summer and don’t know what to do with their plants. At La Fresquera, we are thinking about them, too, and that’s why we are launching the Watering Can Initiative. From 25 June to 15 September, the museum is offering to care for the plants of the residents of Móstoles. All you have to do is fill out a form to choose the days you want to leave us your plants and tell us how to care for them, and we’ll do the rest: find the best spot for them, water them, even talk to them if needed… Here we treat them like they’re one of the family.

In this last reality bite, we immerse ourselves in brain rot, the infinite scroll where time lost onscreen goes. We are inviting all the artists we have partnered with this year to open up a window onto their private lives through their favourite memes and videos in a unique, shared video-tapping. A relaxed conversation with snacks like a celebration of Internet culture and what unites us on the big screen.

Let the drum roll start, the fans flutter and the families get ready, because the festival is about to begin!

The museum is turning into a square, a place of revelry, a meeting point, and it’s opening its doors two at a time to welcome all families in a celebration filled with joy, creativity and unforgettable moments. Welcome to the big celebration of the year!

Because doing needlework and dancing—it’s all about getting started… Let’s gather to celebrate what we’ve shared, what we’ve created and what we’ve experienced! This celebration brings together everyone we’ve worked with throughout the year to close the season enthusiastically with the proposals of the artists who have unquestionably nailed it!

Stars of this big celebration:

Baiven with the kids from ‘Dancing the Neighbourhood’ (Alba Sáenz-López Aumente and Mar Sáenz-López Aumente) have held the Dancing the Neighbourhood workshop on Tuesday afternoons throughout the entire school year. It’s a meeting point for neighbourhood kids where they have discovered dance in unexpected places, expanding their view of movement in the world. What might they be preparing for us for this occasion?

Adriana Reyes and Goya Batalla Batalla have held the From those clays, these seams workshop for nursery and primary school kids, bringing boxes filled with thread, yarn and thimbles, filled with stories they have shared around the pleasure of embroidery. What stories are concealed in those thimbles?

Tania Arias Winogradow, with whom we’ve built real nests where you can rest inside the museum, accompanied by Santiago Rapallo and Eleni Chaidemenaki, suggest a very special afternoon snack for this festive day. Do we really always have to eat sitting around a table?

And now… raise the curtain, play the music and make sure everyone’s here! Because this celebration is not only a party; it’s an homage to everything we’ve experienced. Thanks for stitching this year together with us! See you next year—and keep up this shared joy!

Dear citizens,

We have declared ourselves the mayors of that place called Picnic Sessions 2025 of the CA2M Museum in Móstoles and we’re inviting you to its annual festival.

We’re going to celebrate this festival’s BIG DAY, but we’ve shattered time, so the day will stretch along six Thursdays from 29 May to 3 July.

On the first day, there will be something resembling opening speeches, bingo and a tasting, and the following Thursday we’ll celebrate a kind of dance-and-vermouth and a kind of community meal. The next one will be for afternoon socialising and then the night-time event, and lastly will come the fanfares.

All of these metaphors will involve artistic activities that will be incredible and magical in many ways, including performances, lip syncs, dances, staged pieces, concerts, DJ sessions and more.

The master of ceremonies all six days will be La Sorny, a brilliant club kid. She’ll guide us through this extended, vibrant day of celebrating, doing wonderful things, caring for one another and laughing together, and creating a space where all of this can happen.

Signed: the picnic mayor’s office that loves you.

Lara Brown and Anto Rodríguez.

PROGRAMME ►(download the full programme here)