Activity

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)

Based on the different exhibitions, activities and workshops, as well as the museum’s collection, we are suggesting different encounters and viewpoints on contemporary artistic practices and their capacity for influence and social transformation. To do so, we will invite guests, but not only cultural stakeholders and visual artists; that porosity in the title opens up the arena to other creators and disciplines, allowing for encounters with writers, scientists, designers, performers, musicians and more. Our main goal is to break that systematic distance between the general public and the white cube by bringing together different voices around contemporary culture.

Music will be an essential feature that serves as the common thread in each of the activities, and each session will come with a playlist inspired by the topic being discussed. We are suggesting one encounter a month, making a total of eight podcasts.

We invite you to start listening in the flowery, fair-filled month of May and to participate in this new CA2M Museum radio adventure.

Host- Natalia Piñuel Martín

Art historian, cultural researcher and curator. She is the co-founder of the Madrid-based platform Playtime Audiovisuales, where she develops projects for museums and cultural spaces like MUSAC (León), DA2 (Salamanca), Espacio Fundación Telefónica, La Casa Encendida (Madrid), AECID and the Instituto Cervantes. Playtime Audiovisuales has been curating the El Cine Rev[b]elado series at the Centro de Arte 2 de Mayo since 2014. She is the director of the festival project and agency She Makes Noise. She regularly writes in the media and teaches and gives talks about contemporary artistic practices and gender issues. She has programmed audiovisual and performance exhibitions and series and has worked regularly in radio and podcasts since 2018.

#3_Candela Capitán_From Otherness: On the Ostro Live Art Series

Our guest at this third altered, porous gathering is the performer and choreographer Candela Capitán, one of the leading figures on the contemporary dance scene in Spain. Capitán is presenting her piece Sound Cell as part of the Ostro Live Art Series.

Also with us is the Barcelona-based DJ, performer and programmer Meritxell de Soto.

The playlist, like our guests, is characterised by dissidences and the most disruptive electronic production, and like Ostro, the southerly wind that moves and changes everything in its path, we wish you a warm and happy summer.

EPISODE #3 ► (Listen on SoundCloud)

PLAYLIST #3 ► (Listen on Spotify)

#2_Le Parody_From Smallness: On the Ria exhibition by Jorge Satorre

Our guest at this second altered, porous gathering is Le Parody, the musical project of the Málaga-Granada artist Sole Parody, who after many years in Madrid is now a “voluntary exile” in the fields of Castile. Le Parody interrelates pop, tribal folklores, flamenco and electronic music in her production. She makes songs about love and heartbreak, revolutions, bodies and community dances, the ones that would fit in the gap between a street party and a rave. Le Parody’s new album Remedios, released only a few months ago, feels more luminous than her earlier ones, merging influences from the African continent and pop lyrics with smallness, small remedies (rather than pieces of advice and major speeches) for resilience and a better world.

Also with us is the composer, producer and pianist Hara Alonso from Stockholm, and we talk about Maddi Barber’s films about caring and the rural world. The accompanying playlist features minimalist and ambient music, because as well as dancing to electronic music you can listen to it, so we invite you to discover quite a few of its creators.

EPISODE #2 ► (Listen on SoundCloud)

PLAYLIST #2 ► (Listen on Spotify)

#1_Sabina Urraca_The Imagined Universe – Around the María Medem exhibition

Imagen: Andrea Fernández Plata

We invited the writer and editor Sabina Urraca for this first altered, porous gathering. Originally from San Sebastián, she was raised in Tenerife and currently lives in Madrid. She is the author of the novels Las niñas prodigio (Fulgencio Pimentel, 2017), Soñó con la chica que robaba un caballo (Lengua de trapo, 2021), Chachachá (Dueto) (Comisura, 2023) and El celo (Alfaguara, 2024). Her short stories and the translations of some chapters of her books have been published in magazines like The White Review (UK), The Washington Square Review (USA), Picnic (Mexico), Mercurio, Los Bárbaros, Salvaje, Matador and La Pública, and she has contributed to media like El País, El Cultural, Vice and Cinemanía with columns, articles and essays. She has a monthly column in the literary journal Zenda. She has taught writing workshops in Spain, Mexico, El Salvador and Costa Rica. In 2019, she debuted as an editor of Panza de burro written by Andrea Abreu (Editorial Barrett). She was a resident editor at the Caballo de Troya imprint (Penguin Random House) in 2023 and 2024. In 2022, she received a Leonardo grant for creators from the BBVA Foundation. She has just released her new book, Escribir antes, published by Ediciones Comisura. Sabina (the human) lives with Murcia (the dog) who got her name because she was found in Murcia and since then has been a constant inspiration for the human.

We also welcomed input from the visual artist, curator and poet Leto Ybarra and the filmmaker and animated artist David Domingo, AKA Stanley Sunday. The playlist comes with the Austro-Hungarian imprint plus an extra surprise bonus from Sabina Urraca. 

EPISODE #1 ► (Listen on SoundCloud)

PLAYLIST #1 ►(Listen on Spotify)

The Museo CA2M is collaborating in the fifth and latest edition of Domingo, the performing arts festival hosted by La Casa Encendida and curated by Fernando Gandasegui that over the last five years has brought together national and international artists to encourage experimental languages.

As in previous editions, Domingo 2025 revolves around listening to what is happening on the current scene, delving deeper into the main themes that the programme has explored over the years: the convergence and opening of different disciplines, generations and geographical regions; the protagonism of the voice and the performativity of sound; the power of the political and sensitive agency of images and imagination; the exercise of joyful criticism in art practice; the proposal of alternatives for encounter and transmission between audiences and artists; somato-political practices in southern Europe; and, above all, the promotion and dissemination of radically experimental languages to counteract the flattening effect of neoliberal trends.

Thursday 13 March SUI. Free admission on a first come, first served basis.

• 19:00 ORELLES VOLADORES Nilo Gallego
• 20:15 CLARALINDA, CLARALINDA, CLARALINDA Luísa Saraiva

ORELLES VOLADORES. Nilo Gallego 19:00h Approximate duration: 1 hour

In Orelles voladores, Nilo Gallego surrenders to his experience as a percussionist and sound recordist while inviting the audience to search for a new music theory and a new sense of tuning through simplicity and honesty. Because every sound that reaches our ears, bounced back and filtered through all the materials it encounters along the way, has a story to tell; a story which, over the years, we learn to ignore over and which this piece invites us to rediscover.

Orelles voladores is a percussion concert in which the artist encourages us to form a percussion orchestra with our eardrums, and use the act of listening as our drumsticks. The concert changes every time it is performed, adapting to each space and situation. For this occasion, the performance will also feature the percussionist Frankuu Carrascosa and An Amateur Choir, the open project based at the Museo CA2M that has been operating for eight years and of which Nilo himself is a member.

Nilo Gallego (Ponferrada, León) is a musician and artist who gives performances in which experimentation with sound is the starting point. His pieces always have a playful element and seek interaction with the immediate environment and the ordinary. He is a member of the experimental action collective Orquestina de pigmeos (with Chus Domínguez) and regularly works with creators like Silvia Zayas, Alex Reynolds and the company Societat Doctor Alonso. He plays drums, percussion and electronic devices, and in addition to musical creation he designs soundscapes for contemporary theatre and dance companies. He has presented his work at national and international live arts festivals. He also designs tools and runs educational workshops based on listening and sound creation.

Credits Creation and performance: Nilo Gallego. Collaborations: Frankuu Carrascosa and An Amateur Choir. Audiovisual coordination and accompaniment: Chus Domínguez. Writing support: Álex Reynolds.. Co-production: TNT (Terrassa Noves Tendencies) Festival; Residencies with the support of : Espai nyamnyam, El Consulado Fonteta, Espacio Los Barros, La Poderosa and L’Estruch.

CLARALINDA, CLARALINDA, CLARALINDA Luísa Saraiva 20:15h Approximate duration: 40 minutes

Claralinda, Claralinda, Claralinda is a choreographic songbook in which Luísa Saraiva shares her practice and extensive research on the physicality of singing, the limits of the female voice and the haptic nature of sound. Analysing different types of songs and instruments and travelling through excerpts from her works, she explores the sonic possibilities between breathing, sound and singing through a movement practice that visually presents the physical effort involved in controlling the breath. The songs are added, transformed and improvised according to the research and process in which Luísa is engaged at a given time. Her musical universe is inspired by traditional folk songs from central and northern Portugal.

Luisa Saravia is a choreographer who lives between Porto and Berlin. Her artistic practice investigates the language of the body and voice, situated at the intersection between movement and musical composition. Her work is deeply influenced by research on the physicality of the voice and a contemporary, non-essentialist perspective of folklore and tradition.  Luísa studied psychology at the University of Porto and dance at the Folkwang Arts University in Essen, Germany. She has worked with artists from different disciplines, such as Lea Letzel, Carlos Azeredo Mesquita and Senem Gökce Ogultekin. She has received grants for several art research programmes and in 2019 she was selected for the danceWEB programme and was a choreographer-in-residence at K3 | Tanzplan Hamburg. In 2022/2023 she received the Tanzpraxis grant from the city of Berlin. Since 2020 she has been an activist in the field of mental health in performing arts, promoting workshops and lectures.

Credits Choreography and performance: Luísa Saraiva. Instrument: Inês Tartaruga Água. Acknowledgements: João dos Santos Martins and Associação Parasita.

In association with: