Activity

Odd Dance is a workshop where you can practise typical partner dances as part of a trio. It is designed for all types of individuals who have had all kinds of experiences on dance floors and in nightclubs and ballrooms. Dancing in threes means we will have to arrange ourselves in a different way, and the resulting movements and dances will be radically new. 

 Throughout this workshop, many of the binary assumptions that have accompanied the history of dance and dancing will be questioned. Its main objective is to find other ways of connecting with dance and its history, in order to enjoy the most beautiful and vital aspects that dancing as a community offers us: the pleasure of feeling part of something shared, the joy the body feels when it is moved, the surprise felt when the invisible and the unknown become manifest, the magic that comes from bodies being in tune with the world, the sensation of creating meaning as we dance. 

Oihana Altube is a dancer and choreographer who is trained in Dance Movement Therapy. She works on the margins of Dance and the Living Arts.

 The previous editions of Odd Dance were facilitated by Tania Arias and Mónica Valenciano.

Kept in the finest cabinets of the most ostentatious (and pretentious) homes are the most exclusive sets of dinnerware. Such elegant place settings are only brought out on special occasions for use with great refinement to impress the most distinguished guests. Each item is designed and chosen for its function, and each has its own ritual regarding use, and they include dinner plates, soup bowls, soup tureens, gravy boats, salad bowls and platters of various sizes. 

This workshop will provide us with the privilege and enjoyment of working together with the artist Saelia Aparicio to create a unique set of exclusive dinnerware designed by and for the boys and girls of the Móstoles Children’s Home, who have their meals together daily.

The diners will design exclusive pieces, which may be a plate with a secret compartment where broccoli or fish can be hidden without being discovered, a spectacular dish whose contents can be shared with several children at the same time, carving tools with which to create ephemeral works of art with leftover food, a plate with a handle to comfortably carry delicious food from one table to another table, or perhaps a special plate with a barrier to prevent others from stealing chips; who knows? Textiles may be included, such as a refined tablecloth on which to wipe one’s mouth, because, as we know, table manners are very important.

Saelia Aparicio was born on a secret island in 1982 and lives and works in the United Kingdom. Her work is multidisciplinary, with a recent tendency towards functional sculpture guided by her interest in including senses other than sight in her work.

Some of her most recent projects include works for Jerwood Survey 2, in London; Paraiso Extraño at MUSAC, Leon; We Belong to Each Other at Carlier Gebauer, Berlin; Generaciones 2019; and The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish, curated by the Serpentine Gallery, London.

Last year CA2M started working with the EnterArte teachers’ group. The collaboration gave rise to a workshop exploring the interrelationship between school and museum which exceeded all expectations. This year the project will continue experimenting with the mysterious; an activity inviting us to let ourselves be carried along and discover the space of the museum, paying particular attention to minimum detail, to little things and what normally goes unnoticed.

"Let’s get soaked by a wave, aahh!" is a project working with ideas of transformation, art education and aesthetic play. It is a workshop-parcours-action in which we will experiment with different media, materials and spaces at CA2M for artistic expression.

Anyone turning up to this event will actively generate new narratives with the artworks and spaces at the museum, will compose and decompose, and play. But above all else, they will look at art from a totally different perspective, from childhood. We will imagine new ways and messages to arrive at these new collective narratives and imaginaries.

EnterArte is a group of teachers who work with different areas of education. Its work investigates how to bring art into their respective fields of education. Its mission is to rethink through the filter of art, to take a look at teaching from the optic of contemporary art practice and the relationship between school and museum. Art that reaches out and makes us think and act.

Various authors, whether from the perspective of science fiction literature, like Octavia E. Butler, or contemporary feminist theory, like Donna J. Haraway, advocate the need to overcome certain concepts that condition our contemporary understanding of the world, such as the Anthropocene, and to propose other alternatives, like the Chthulucene, in order to rethink a relationship between species that leaves behind the primacy of the human being as the centre and measure of all things and explores the potential of this relationship to generate new ways of life and possible new more sustainable and solidarity worlds for all species that inhabit it, that allow us to survive the current situation of climatic emergency. From Haraway’s notion of “companion species”, this film season wishes to examine how cinema—understood as a popular manifestation of contemporary anxieties—explores the relationship between species and the human being’s relationship with their environs from various optics; some more catastrophic and others more hopeful, in consonance with Haraway’s vision.

The cult film Phase IV, a canonical example of the apocalyptic sci-fi movie, introduces us to a dystopia in which ants develop a group mind and consciousness of their power and take over control of the Erath, forcing human beings to adapt to the new civilization in which both species have to live together. On the other hand, Soylent Green, another classic sci-fi movie, and a visionary example of the destructive effects of climate emergency, takes a look at the capacity of the human being to destroy the environment in which the Earth must survive.

From a less catastrophic, although no less unsettling perspective, Little Joe reflects on the capacity of science to force this collaboration between species through genetic manipulation and how its form of perverting the course of nature means that it does not always serve human purposes in the way it was intended. The purported supremacy of the human species is brought into question when the modified plants overturn the relationship of power and find ways of surviving that make use of the needs of the people who created them.

Meanwhile, The Shape of Water, Border and Gunda offer gazes that anticipate a less-human oriented future with more interspecies collaborations. Gunda borrows the narrative and formal structures of the documentary to follow the daily life of a pig, two cows, and a one-legged chicken, reminding us that we share the world with millions of different species that deserve to be taken into account and appreciated by us within their own environs, with their own everyday routines and with the same compassion with which we observe ourselves. Border takes a look at how we construct a non-human identity in contemporary Finland and how to develop networks and structures for coexistence between two species—humans and trolls—despite their shared disturbing past. Finally, Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water is a melodrama telling the love story between a woman and an amphibian man, opening the door to a relationship between species like those told by Octavia E. Butler in her sci-fi stories. In conclusion, this film season wishes to offer and explore ways in which film imagines us, how it thinks of other species and our relationship with them and thus anticipate the various worlds in which we will have to live.

Curated by Jara Fernández Meneses and Estrella Serrano Tovar.

Jara Fernández Meneses has curated film seasons for institutions like MNCARS and Cruce, and formed part of the programming team for Cineteca for four years and is a former member of the selection committees for the Documenta and Animario international festivals. She has written film reviews for Cahiers du Cinema. España/Caimán. Cuadernos de cine, cultural reviews for Serie B and has taught film classes in Kent and Exeter universities in the UK and at the Carlos III university in Madrid. In her free time, she likes to deejay vinyl records of black music and to play dominoes.

Estrella Serrano Tovar has worked in institutions like MNCARS, AECID and the Cervantes Institute. Naturally curious, she enjoys learning new ways of interacting with culture and art, understanding relationships with neighbouring communities as a key part of her work and trying to connect with people with shared interests to undertake new projects. She is the head of the Education and Activities department at Museo CA2M since 2020.

There are sounds that stick in your head, like a sewing machine, or when my mother used to wash clothes outside in our backyard, I remember sitting there listening to the rhythm with which she rubbed the clothes against the washboard, and for me, the sound of a washing machine is hypnotic, the purring motor of a fridge is like a whisper and when it rattles out a whistle I would have the iiiiiiiiiii in my brain all day, and I was never sure whether it was me or the machine, tinnitus, tinkling like flowing water inside your head, and then the silence was terrifying, and depending on your position you could hear your vertebrae because we all have internal, interior sounds and you sometimes hear a beat in your ears like when you come out of a club and keep getting that buzzing, ringing pum-pum-pum, and seeing as I live on the seventh floor all the clock bells sound differently and drive me up the wall. Have you never thought that a repetitive sound is like someone talking? Or maybe a ghost. You have to be very careful with all this, look for places that have voices and for voices that seem like they are not there because they are inside your head, in another world, in abandoned villages in Madrid, in the materials of things. We want to learn a song together, to rustle up a storm, to sing to the stars in Valencia and so on until we embrace all the sounds that exist in the universe.

An Amateur Choir is a creative project that welcomes any kind of voice which wishes to participate. Besides our own experimental sessions every second Thursday, we also have sessions with artists who work with the voice and listening. Some of the people who have passed through our choir are: Sonia Megías, Itziar Okáriz, Jaume Ferrete, María Salgado and Fran MM Cabeza de Vaca, Rocío Márquez, Alma Söderberg, Ainara Lagardon, Jhana Beat, Lolita Versache, Bea Narcoléptica, Luz Prado, Los Torreznos, Makiko Kitago, Julián Mayorga, Agnès Pe, Paloma Carrasco, Anto Rodríguez, Elisa C. Martín, Elena Murcia Pinto with Marina Peralta Murcia, Inma Marín with Jon Cañal and Tania Arias Winogradow with Milo-Andrey Ulises, Rolando San Martín, Amalia Fernández, Elena Córdoba, Raquel G. Ibáñez, Alex Reynolds, Black Tulip, tacoderaya, Mónica Valenciano, Ruth Abellán and Arturo Moya, Ojo Último, Monserrat Palacios and Fátima Miranda.