Activity

After months without being able to be physically present in the museum, we are now returning to our performative walkthroughs in order to recover a shared closeness in our exhibitions. We will have to relearn how to move simultaneously through the exhibition halls, to keep our distance while remaining close, to invent new ways of looking after each other, of listening to one another and to share. To this end, the walkthroughs will be limited to a maximum of 10 people. Wednesdays at 7:00 pm and Sundays at 12:30 pm we will explore the exhibition Absurd Humour: A Constellation of Folly in Spain and Saturdays at 7:00 pm Francesc Ruiz. Panal.

To enrol, send a message to educacion.ca2m@madrid.org or call 91 276 02 21. You can also turn up personally at the museum and, if there is still room, you can join the walkthrough, simply leaving your personal details at reception. We are taking all these measures in order to look after one another, and we must be aware that they may be modified with the changing situation. We’re really looking forward to taking these walkthroughs of the museum with you once again.

RESOURCES

From the collection catalogued on our web, we propose ways of looking and position-taking, of listening to one another, and to thus mutate into a body that takes shape among the images. Through motion, making with your hands, thinking in a low voice, giving it your all dancing, stopping for a pause, losing yourself, reading with other authors, answering questions, we propose a series of places and images to look at the collection as much together as we can.

• Alicia Framis, The Walking Ceiling
• Ángeles Marco, Ascensor Oblicuo
• Ciuco Gutiérrez, Locura de amor
• Elina Brotheus, L'étang
• Itziar Okariz, Mear en espacios públicos
• Kiko Pérez, Sin título (Dos manos)
• Mariana Castillo Deball, Maske
• Nora Aurrekoetxea, Milena
• Olafur Eliasson, Moss-series
• Patricia Esquivias, Mural recuperado, Manuel S. Molezún, 1958
• Wilfredo Prieto, Cuba Libre
• Zoe Leonard, I want a president

Para que os lo gocéis en casa, el colectivo Autoplacer/Sindicalistas ha preparado “Archiplacer”, una playlist con 101 temas de artistas que han pasado por el festival durante sus diez años de vida. ¡Que lo disfrutéis!

On Monday 18 May we will be celebrating International Museum Day, with this year’s theme of “Museums for Equality: Diversity and Inclusion”. Despite the fact that our doors are still closed, we will celebrate the importance of institutions like ours throughout the whole week on our social media.
 

We will begin by defending the essential role played by all the people who have continued working in the museum throughout the confinement: security and cleaning staff, who ensure that it is maintained in optimum conditions for the day when we are able to return. For many years now, we have been refocusing our collections so that the acquisitions we make respond to criteria of equality, for instance enhancing exhibitions by women artists who still do not enjoy the institutional recognition they deserve. Besides our commitment with gender inclusivity, we are also working to ensure the visibility and representation of all forms of life, expanding the LGTBIQ perspective in our programming and collection, but also introducing intersectional criteria that includes raciality: it is fundamental to focus on issues of racism and our own institutional role in its networks of exclusion, a task that is still a long way from being completed.
 

Here at CA2M, many unexpected situations take place in the encounter between visitors and the material culture preserved here. The exhibition halls are a place where we can meet strangers, but there is also a peculiar physical encounter between objects and people. We believe that life in the museum, to be completely inclusive, has to be aware that it is a space of coexistence, a place where the aesthetic experience enables us to recover the magical dimension of things and species.
 

In May 2007, the Mexican artist Damián Ortega installed Obelisco transportable in Doris C. Freedman Plaza in New York. This obelisk on wheels is a biting comment on the displacement of the centres in big cities and the stability of symbols of power in the city space. Today this obelisk is in Móstoles, lying prostrate in our storeroom. It could be raised to its feet (or wheels) any given day here in our own halls or could travel to some other place, to mark the spot of a new centre. The screens of our smartphones or laptops become our portable exhibition halls, places of power where discourses and reflections are directed, affecting our emotions and consciences or helping us to imagine a new representation of the world. The radical experience of the body’s relationship with everything else will still have to wait another few weeks, when we open our doors once again and brush the cobwebs off the exhibition on absurd humour in Spain. But this museum, CA2M, will continue latent like a sleeping portable obelisk.
 

Happy International Museum Day!

The conjunction was inevitable. While Filmoteca Española (FE), jointly with the publishers Cátedra, were publishing the book La codorniz (de la revista a la pantalla y viceversa), by Aguilar and Cabrerizo, Centro de Arte 2 de Mayo (CA2M) was preparing the exhibition “Absurd Humour” and the book of the same name by the curator Mery Cuesta. To a certain extent, they were forced to get on and, as was the case in hand, “to associate together” in order to jointly imagine a shared variety show. And so, driven by the unbridled imagination of the current confinement, this double programme came about with an evident desire to strike up another equally necessary coupling: a bridge between two generations of comedians with several decades between them. Does the blood of Codorniz humour run through the veins of Chanante humour and its contemporary derivates?

FE and CA2M organized a series of events and rereadings of filmic creations that arose around the satirical magazine La Codorniz run by some of the most outstanding voices in absurd humour today. The playful, surrealist quality of the folly unquestionably runs through the veins of these proposals which, in the second programme, focus on a direct intervention in creations from the past through the optic of the present moment. While Joaquín Reyes dubs fragments of Noticiario de Cine-Club newsreels featuring intellectuals and forward-thinkers from Madrid and Barcelona in 1930, the Tono & Mihura’s “humoristic production” called Un bigote para dos [A Moustache For Two]–“a stupid film for serious people”—is given a revamp by the hands (and voices) of the humoristic practices of Juan Cavestany, Julián Genisson and Lorena Iglesias (members of the Canódromo Abandonado collective) and Venga Monjas.

CAs if they were Jardiel Poncela’s parodic overdubbings of silent movies called “celuloides rancios” now updated to the digital era, the double programme “A Moustache for the 21st Century” goes to clearly show the generational transmission of a kind of nonsense logic humour that ran through Spanish films for many decades, and which is still alive today (at least we believe so) in more contemporary humoristic practices. The connections between Tono & Mihura and Venga Monjas, or between Neville and Joaquín Reyes, emerge naturally, revealing the staying power of absurd humour as a sign of identity of Spanish culture. At the same time, Chanante humour is paired directly with its spiritual forebears, raising absurd laughter. And so to paraphrase the fairground huckster in Verbena: “Step right in [ladies and gentlemen]! Have we a just and moral show for you!”.

SESSIONS

CODORNICESCAS PRESENTATIONS | From 22 May

A whole series of audiovisual productions sprung up around La Codorniz, the most iconic satirical magazine in the history of Spanish popular culture. Today these productions are revisited (and recommended) by the researchers Aguilar and Cabrerizo and the filmmaker Carlo Padial (Algo muy gordo, 2017).

_ Verbena (1941), by Edgar Neville [31 min]. Presentation by Santiago Aguilar and Felipe Cabrerizo.
_ Don Viudo de Rodríguez (1935), by Jerónimo Mihura [14 min], + El corazón de un bandido (1968), by Chumy Chúmez [7 min]. Presentations by Carlo Padial.

SCREWBALL OVERDUBBINGS | From 5 June

The practice of screwball overdubbing, the audiovisual sound and image collage, is an excellent way of creating an absurd humoristic effect. Thanks to Tono & Mihura’s Un bigote para dos, their 1940 screwball film, a comedy rewriting of the dialogue of a Johann Strauss biopic, and to Jardiel Poncela and his “celuloides rancios”, these redubbings were hugely popular back in the 1940s. Today we have chosen the filmmaker Juan Cavestany (Gente en sitios, 2013) and two comedian duos, Julián Genisson & Lorena Iglesias and Venga Monjas, to revisit this vintage comic practice from Spanish culture and to make a new dubbing for Un bigote para dos. The programme is rounded off with a dubbing by Joaquín Reyes, in the style of his “Retrospecter” or “Mundo viejuno” sketches, of a newsreel directed by Giménez Caballero.

_ Noticiario de Cine-Club (1930), by Ernesto Giménez Caballero [31 min]. Fragment dubbed by Joaquín Reyes.
_ Un bigote para dos (1940), by Tono y Mihura [64 min]. Dubbed by (in order of appearance) Juan Cavestany (subtitling) / Julián Genisson & Lorena Iglesias / Venga Monjas.

Last spring we started a workshop for all kinds of bodies which, at the same time, have had all kinds of experiences on dancefloors, parties and festivals. The proposal consists in practicing in trios a series of classic dances for two. We will try to imagine what it is like for three people to dance a tango, a pasodoble or any other dance step. Perhaps it will be much more difficult to follow the rhythm and the steps, but maybe in doing so we will discover new ways of moving.

Tania Arias Winogradow is a dancer, choreographer and now a mother. She works collaboratively with other artists and continues looking for allies to improve her Russian.