3_Eras is an unpublished text by José Luis Brea based on the film version of the book Las tres eras de la imagen. This film, made by María Virginia Jaua and José Luis Brea, included visual and sonic imagery.
Even if we wanted to, we cannot kill our dead. The dead have summoned us to undertake certain tasks, and so we carry them around with us in our lives every day, in little gestures and flashes of very intense sensations. How can we share these losses, the part of them that has stuck to us, their strange temporalities, the hankering to bury our heart, the pain of Blue — the uncertain stumbling Buzz —? I wanted to build a boat, and take it down river, to sail its waters and once again bind me to the branches and birds that bring back so many memories. Some people want to light a fire, or perhaps burn the piles of straw and wood gathered by so many hands one late summer’s evening. There are people who sew fruit peel, stitching those dry skins to conjure friends that had to leave us, very soon and very far away.
There are no words, our bedraggled eyes no longer see, perhaps only some gestures can be both offering and memorial... As if together we watched over a bonfire to keep alive through our bodies and stories someone who, though no longer with us, will always be there. And because we are forced to look the other way, not to believe, to fall ill, then giving ourselves our own rituals is the basic task of the living. Because death in the end is only for us, those who remain behind, those who are brave enough to provide room for a love that is eternal and that only transforms. Mourning is a political task, it builds community, it is a practice of care that reproduces life. In mourning we are together, the feeling of isolation is only the symptom of a society drowning in silence. I speak with my friends about this, that I believe that our grandmothers were the last to live with a sensibility that understood death as a part of life, that they knew how to meet again on earth, that now perhaps it was our task to create other rituals, other ways of being, of living and of dying. Sometimes we don’t know how, nor even understand why, it is just a flash, an intuition, a desire. Maybe it is only a question of listening, and of a deep love. And in that we are never alone.
Principal researcher: Marta Echaves
* Title inspired by Emily Dickinson’s poem 465 to death.
Even if we wanted to, we cannot kill our dead. The dead have summoned us to undertake certain tasks, and so we carry them around with us in our lives every day, in little gestures and flashes of very intense sensations. How can we share these losses, the part of them that has stuck to us, their strange temporalities, the hankering to bury our heart, the pain of Blue — the uncertain stumbling Buzz —?
One can recognize in the texts by Manel Clot (Granollers, 1956-2016) a multiplicity of incipient ideas, obsessive desires, rough references, the validity of nostalgia, inopportune utopias and sudden fatigues that traverse the fleetingness of the sentence and dominate his thinking almost permanently. They are not anachronisms but rather reminiscences of the 1990s, of its darkness and sweetness; a discursive production that implemented the concept of club culture and the language of night life in relation with contemporary art practices.
One cold night the body explains that everything is balanced, except the little losses of heat registered during every exchange of information. What remains, in fact, are those drops of sweat that the body misses. The pores sweat, exude a kind of self-conscious tenderness.
What Can I Do with the Rest of My Body is a research group whose members are Víctor Aguado Machuca, Jesús Alcaide and Néstor García Díaz. The title is taken from Musée des phrases, 2003-2015 by Manel Clot.
One can recognize in the texts by Manel Clot a multiplicity of incipient ideas, obsessive desires, rough references, the validity of nostalgia, inopportune utopias and sudden fatigues that traverse the fleetingness of the sentence and dominate his thinking almost permanently. They are not anachronisms but rather reminiscences of the 1990s.
The need to ask ourselves about the possibilities for engaging today with the live arts has encouraged SUSANA to pose questions from where we observe, reflect on and implement the reality in which we inhabit.
How do we create an axis that structures this reality in order to address it? An axis that at once serves as a new field of work expanded for the future, beyond the specificity of the new and changing moment we are living through and which, furthermore, engages with experiences from artists, past and present, that help us to reflect and learn from them. To this end, and acknowledging our impulse, we have realized that in order to start building we need to begin at the beginning: oneself.
SUSANA is a research group whose members are Juanito Jones, María Buey, Maral Kekejian and Lorenzo García-Andrade.
The need to ask ourselves about the possibilities for engaging today with the live arts has encouraged SUSANA to pose questions from where we observe, reflect on and implement the reality in which we inhabit. How do we create an axis that structures this reality in order to address it?
We are going to do things that last, that take time and that need time. We will make sure that whatever it is that is coming down the line will find us with our hands busy. This year we want to actually make the paper on which next year’s education notebook will be printed, so that we are engaged in the present and with what comes later. And also to pick up again what we have not been doing or doing just a bit, looking at how the plants in the roof terrace change and make an almanac of all those cycles, return to the Europa secondary school and its art workshops. To resume and to do again.
Agua de Borrajas is a joint publishing project run by CA2M’s education department and the Roma printers.
More information: educacion.ca2m@madrid.org / 912 760 225
Agua de Borrajas is a joint publishing project run by CA2M’s education department and the Roma printers. We are going to do things that last, that take time and that need time. We will make sure that whatever it is that is coming down the line will find us with our hands busy.
Directed by Selina Blasco
As we all know, ‘what is and what is not’ is a question of as, how and when. It might be that art is, exists, without us people. It is more than likely. But if we feel that it is something that accompanies us, that it is there by our side, it is because it calls out and says something to us. As it does so in its own way, we—ever attentive to the signals it emits—listen and feel free to respond in many different ways. Sometimes we try to so with its own tools and sometimes we look for ones that we think prevent us from going too far, that beat about the bush or even over the tree tops. We almost always reply to art and, to this end, we fall back on words, whether written or spoken. We start speaking from below, from within and from without—those places in which, some time ago now, Donna Haraway recommended that we should place our situated gaze. We use our body and mind to translate what art says to us and, while we are dealing with it, things arise about ourselves about which we had never stopped to think. Knowing it and knowing ourselves. We judge and we even try not only to come up with a criterion which furthermore, and this is even more complicated, must also be intelligible and be able to be shared in order to strike up conversations with others that have more than two speakers.
Let’s face it, communication is not simple. We don’t understand well or we don’t understand altogether. And it is a problem, but problems are precisely what means that questions like “But … Is this art?” leave open a lot more questions. And so we continue, looking forward to more and more questions that will keep coming up. And just as a kind of spark, we will recover one which we read in a conversation guided by Carlos Rod and Ángela Segovia: Do we only speak about that for which we have a vocabulary? There you have it.
CA2M organises educational activities on contemporary art and thinking that can be framed within the tradition of community colleges. The courses it offers address some of the key issues for a proper understanding and interpretation of art today. These activities can be divided into two parts: the first consists of the presentation of a theme by a guest speaker and the second part involves a debate open to the audience. But this structure can also change to adapt to more experimental formats depending on the guest at each session.
SESSIONS
19 FEBRUARY
Selina Blasco | Described images
Ancient rhetoricians argued that conceiving different figures of discourse was a moderate exercise that served as training to overcome greater difficulties. Among them, description was defined as a kind of narration able to translate the visible. Its literary attributes were clarity and vividness, and the style of writing had to adapt to the nature of the theme. This description, which also demanded for the thing to be described to be treated as an inanimate object devoid of will, was not conceived for works of art. When the description is specialized in this type of artefact (especially paintings), evoking something that is believed to be full of life demands going beyond the sense of sight; it is necessary to complete what one sees.
The history of this kind of discourse is very long, but above all else we are interested in its potential to be elaborated in the present. What do we say about art when we describe it? What contents have to do with visual, material and narrative aspects and what is the “part” that corresponds to the sentient? How do we give a name to the cry, the pain or the pleasure, separately or all together? And what do we do with movement? Even though we know that there is no such thing as a transparent text, would it be possible to recover one that might be close to the piece and to the immediacy of the impression? Something that could provide a response to the erotic of art that Susan Sontag called for (no less than in 1964) to replace hermeneutics, interpretation?
Selina Blasco is a lecturer at the School of Fine Arts at Universidad Complutense de Madrid.
26 FEBRUARY
Gloria G. Durán | On Elegance, High Heels and Bling-Bling
We are going to make the most of the exhibition Absurd Humour: A Constellation of Folly in Spain, curated by Mery Cuesta, to try to tell things in a different way. A way in which the role of women, forming a constellation of true future cuplé stars, becomes critical for a proper understanding of what is happening today, right now, in Spain. We have rarely been told that in the so-called Silver Age at the beginning of the twentieth century we had our own foulmouthed and lewd trap artists who were stars in a glowing firmament that filled the thousands of theatres, fleapits and cafés chantants that sprung up in every town and city in Spain. We were never told that it would be intellectuals that encouraged many of them to make their debut. Just as today Ernesto Castro Flores champions Bad Gyal, in his day Azorín championed La Chelito. The moment of splendour in which high and low culture met, when a cuplé artist like Amalia de Isaura sings ¡¡Ultraismo Puro!! or Rodrigo Cuevas renders La Vaselina in the main auditorium at the University of Oviedo, speak of those memorable times in suspension that can give rise to another form of telling what we have always been told with a superficial brushstroke. We will explore the potential of talking about art with a gaze from below, from underneath, through and in crossfit. Be ready for surprises.
Gloria G. Durán is a Doctor in Fine Arts from UPV in Valencia, an expert in dandyism and countergender, salons and salonniêres, vanguard, cuplé, sicalipsis innuendo and net-artivism from a gender perspective. She multi-jobs in the service of art teaching at UCM, USAL and Escuela Sur.
4 MARCH
Iniciativa Sexual Femenina | Each Body in its Own Cry and God in Everyone’s
St Teresa, the squatter mystic, must have had her good reasons to think that the body was a prison. As good as the reasons of the declassed Madame Bovary to start to desire her husband only when she was burning with desire for a lover. And how could we not understand Gottfried Benn, the Nazi forensic pathologist who wrote poems to the spectacle of human putrefaction; or Angélica Liddell, evangelist number five, singing to necrophilia. We don’t know for sure what the body actually is, but we do know that the body is a problem: a tool, a source, the cheapest instrument with which to make (or consecrate ourselves to) art. The dancer shares with the corpse a wonderful linguistic coincidence: the two are spoken of as “bodies”. Is everything that moves a body? Is all that glitters gold?
Iniciativa Sexual Femenina (Élise Moreau, Cristina Morales and Elisa Keisanen) is a contemporary dance collective with a feminist, libertarian and anti-academic outlook. Their first piece, Catalina (2019) explores sexual pleasure, repression and its consequences both on stage and in real life. The second, Pato – merengue para espéculos vaginales, also from 2019, is their way of celebrating the centenary of the Mujeres libres anarcho-feminist journal.
11 MARCH
Joaquín Jesús Sánchez | I Understand Things when I Write Them: A Personal Approximation to Art Criticism
What does an art critic do? This very question has intrigued various generations. Do they measure artworks with strange implements? Do they cruelly interrogate artists until getting to the bottom of their true intentions? Do they rub crystal balls in the intimacy of their offices? In this session we will try to demonstrate that, as is usually the case, reality is a lot more straightforward. We endeavour to explain how the entelechy called “criteria” is formed, what is the modus operandi of someone who practices this trade, and we will confess how the hell a critic actually writes. As the work of a critic is basically a work of writing, we will focus on the complications involved in summarising, commenting on and evaluating an exhibition. To this end, we will take a look at some interesting, and even praiseworthy, examples. Afterwards, you will have an insight into the most carefully-guarded and shameful secrets of art criticism: for instance, that it is almost always written by people in pyjamas with dishevelled hair.
Joaquín Jesús Sánchez is an art critic, writer and exhibition curator. He writes regularly for ArtForum and Babelia, as well as other cultural publications. His exciting adventures can be followed on unmaletinmarron.com
18 MARCH
Víctor Iriarte | Cinema of Memory
The situation is the following: someone, somebody close, asks us, maybe by phone, maybe during a stroll together, maybe during a car ride, about a film. This is the starting point for Cinema of Memory: the exercise that we sometimes undertake when we are asked a question about a movie we have seen and which, after the question, we start to talk about in words. This translation-transmutation of words to images is the origin of this theoretical endeavour on the relationship between cinema and orality and indeed with other artistic disciplines. I am interested in the gesture involved in the re-enactment, in the place in which the speaker and the listener situate themselves. During this session we will try to explore this gesture, which speaks to something very primitive and essential: the creation of images through the word. And now the question: In what way does cinema, as a popular art form and exercise in shared viewing, cut through us and become part of our personal biography? We will therefore try to trace how the cinema we have inside us every time we see and have to talk about a film becomes present in our lives and in other disciplines of contemporary art. This is where we will speak of the work of artists like Manuel Puig, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Stine Marie Jacobsen, Fiona Banner, Itziar Okariz, Cindy Sherman, Miranda July, Amaia Urra, Geoff Dyer, Beatriz Santiago, Marguerite Duras, Alexander Kluge, Édouard Levé, Alex Reynolds, Project Leve (Esperanza Collado), and so on.
Víctor Iriarte works watching films. His career combines programming with his own personal creation. In 2012 he premiered his first feature-length film, Invisible, at the FID festival in Marseilles. As an artist he has presented his works in various museums and art centres and the Incorpore publishers has just released his book Geometría.
25 MARCH
Coco Moya | On How Secrets Desire Us
To keep a secret, you have to tell it. Having a secret is to become part of a chain of custody; to have a secret is really more a case of the secret having you to transmit itself through you. This becoming a medium, putting yourself at its service, is what having a secret could mean. A secret is a currency: it circulates, without any inherent value in itself other than what it has in common between us, an intimacy, a belonging, a commitment. What is the potential of the secret for resistance? Is what is most visible the least vulnerable? From the strategies of art, the formless formats of the secret are operations to create meaning against all odds. Building meaning despite not existing in law. The efficacy of a code that overflows its ornamented camouflage. Why are artists so fond of secret societies? Do they like the ambiguity between existence and the invisible? To bring up a specific case, we could talk about Sociedad Secreta de la Ciudad de las Damas, a conclave of women whose most recognised achievement is to have kept in anonymity hundreds of women artists who did not wish to enter the annals of Art History.
Coco Moya is a musician and artist. He experiments with secrets, geomancy and altered perception, forms of knowledge and relations that exceed means of communication to convert us in a medium of communication.
1 APRIL
Contadas obras III
Contadas obras (Spoken artworks) is an initiative that came about from a bus trip and other coincidences, organized by Javier Pérez Iglesias, Raquel G. Ibáñez, Selina Blasco and Christian Fernández Mirón. On two prior occasions, a group of people got together to listen to others talk about a work of art that had made a special impression on them, for whatever reason. Each person speaks with their own voice and narrative recourses, because there are no images. The piece will be revealed with words, without being seen, through the story and only for those who are present to listen to it. Nor will there be any kind of register other than what the people who are present are able to recall when they leave the hall. And so we will have to keep all our senses alert, to allow ourselves to be carried along by the intensity aroused by a keen awareness of the ephemeral nature of the experience and activating the memory. Works will be spoken by Andrea Galaxina, Andrea Rodrigo, Carlos Copertone and Yuji Kawasima. This is its third iteration.
Andrea Galaxina is an art historian, fanzine fanatic and founder of the Bombas para Desayunar micro-publishers, from where she produces and conceives fanzines.
Andrea Rodrigo’s practice embraces contemporary choreography, dance and curatorship, working with curated programmes–like Saliva together with Ainhoa Hernández at CentroCentro, Madrid (2018)– and laboratories in the practice, writing and accompaniment of choreographers and artists like Valentina Desideri, Corazón del Sol and Claudia Pagès.
Carlos Copertone is a doctor from the University of Extremadura, specialized in city planning and zoning. He has edited books on art and architecture for Caniche Editorial and has also carried out curatorial work.
Yuji Kawasima is a doctor in Art History from Universidad Complutense de Madrid. He develops his work in the field of research, curatorship and teaching, with a special interest in gender and queer studies in Latin-American cultural contexts.
PLAZAS COMPLETAS. Para apuntarte a la lista de espera escribe a actividades.ca2m@madrid.org. No es necesario ningún conocimiento previo.
As we all know, ‘what is and what is not’ is a question of as, how and when. It might be that art is, exists, without us people. It is more than likely.
This course, tirelessly twirling and entranced, we will continue revolving around doubts and the astonishment induced by the inexplicable: what is art and what is not art. We will take advantage of the fact that we are a little dizzy and we will explore the desire to leave our bodies and our minds and wander. That is, with a lot of emotion and a lot of feeling. We wish to set out on different paths, to examine with awe what we believe we know well and we will go to where we thought (though can we be sure?) we had never been to before. We will let art take us by the hand and we will let ourselves be carried along. To places as close as our own skin, which will be dyed and renewed; as far away as we could possibly imagine, because it is still waiting to be, and besides, does not wish to define itself.
We will make a different kind of contact with what is around us in order to take distance with customs and habits. We feel like losing control. And stretching time and space: an infinite and eternal present and reinvented places it is difficult to return to. And if different when we do return, let it be because we will have known each other in a different way through other things and other people. And now that we no longer look at the world in the same way as when we started, we will understand it better. We will experience life by letting ourselves be carried along by whatever happens and art as something that transforms.
CA2M organises educational activities on contemporary art and thinking that can be framed within the tradition of community colleges, aimed particularly at young and adult students. The courses it offers address some of the key issues for a proper understanding and interpretation of art today, to use it to think. These activities can be divided into two parts: the first consists of the presentation of a theme by a guest speaker and the second part involves a debate open to the audience. But this structure can also change to adapt to more experimental formats depending on the guest at each session.
Directed by Selina Blasco
Aimed at anyone interested in the art of today. No prior knowledge required
23 January
Tatuarot. Whisky and religion
Julio Linares
Whenever it gets a tattoo, the day becomes Sunday. Without a prior conscious decision, tattoo sessions end up as a kind of ritual. A strangely intimate bond is formed through the penetration of ink and metal. The skin is broken, impregnated and changed for ever. And it is this forever-ness that gives everything a certain mystic quality.
It is beautiful to be the vehicle through which the materialisation of the desire of another is channelled. It requires such total concentration that the present takes on absolute splendour.
And with the magic and power of the present, the miracle of transmutation takes place.
Julio Linares. Saga of antiquarians, then a pirate, scientific servant, master of feng shui and painter.
30 January
Enter username _
Elandorphium
- Please follow the instructions if you would be so kind: choose your username. Now choose your sex. Now choose your form. Now choose your colour. Now choose your texture. Now choose your voice.
The system informs that there is an already existing image. During the process, an algorithm is developed that allows resetting and reconfiguration of a new archive. Please wait
Elandorphium, xx/xx/xxxx (date unknown) is a body that studies the limits between organic mass and the digital dimension. What is matter and what is artifice?
6 February
art during
Selina Blasco
In art, one is here and there. Are there states of total concentration and isolation when creating? How does one create when one is doing something else? Creating, building, in fantasy, in intoxication, in illness, in care, in waiting, in ecstasy and in tears. We will explore practices that, more than between, are in. Some arise explicitly, but we can look back at others which, in principle, seem to be something else and seem different from another perspective.
We will look for an art of being in two things at once, subversively and pleasurably.
Selina Blasco lectures at the School of Fine Arts at Universidad Complutense.
13 February
A kind of poor stone
Amalia and Luisa
Clay is granite decomposed and disintegrated by erosion.
A friend once said that if I was a stone, I would be a poor brittle kind of stone like sandstone or serpentine, or maybe schist. Or maybe not even rock but clay, or not even clay but earth. I am only earth. I give way. I try to fit in. I am still here and I am still earth, but I am full of footprints and deep holes and traces and alterations.
We want to talk about the world, which is made of earth. To think about material and its processes in order to talk about things. And to talk about ceramics. We have understood some things better after we have touched earth.
About a year or so ago we got together every week in Luisa’s studio in Leganés. We always started by speaking of ourselves, and then we spoke about earth; what it can do.
Amalia currently works at CA2M. Luisa is a self-taught ceramist, active in Adult Learning since the beginning.
20 February
Latino-Futurism
Julián Mayorga
Many immigrants living in Spain ask themselves about the absence of Latin America in dominant futurist imaginaries, and about the value of their community’s cultural practices in art categories. A possible response, from art, could be to focus on exploring tactics of re-invention, resistance/re-existence and re-identification from music and its mise en scène.
We get together to question whether it is possible for these local practices to converse with forms we understand as universal/global, whether it is possible to kick the habit of the modern narrative and to re-inject the enigmatic into our forms of doing and saying; whether we can imbue with importance a new mythology that represents a local landscape and experience.
Julián Mayorga is a Colombian musician and artist based in Madrid; his music spans from sound experimentation to traditional Latin-American music and pop.
27 February
VenidaDevenida
The production of space through dissident practices. The construction of non-normative spaces begins with acts of resistance against dominant structures that create networks of dissidence in the city and which, in many cases, can be mapped.
The queer appropriation of space is one of the clearest examples to demonstrate how the hierarchies of spatial distinction can be distorted, altering preconceived binary ideas that have to do with perceptions of the public and the private, the legal and the illegal, and so on.
The production of space is not just the remit of city planners, architects and builders, but is also the result of social action and cultural construction. Through the study of different dissident practices localised throughout history and their corresponding cartographies, we will demonstrate how users can pervert and generate personal spaces by means of tactics of re-appropriation.
VenidaDevenida are architects and artists.
6 March
Drifts of the self in our environment: walking to explore (ourselves)
Tonia Raquejo
Through a series of practical awareness-raising exercises we will analyse the implications of the experience in the territory, paying attention to how we feel what it is we feel and how we organise the perceptions and kinesic behaviours they generate. Taking this as our starting point, we will analyse how we communicate with our surrounding environs and what kind of mental maps we create, both individually and collectively.
Tonia Raquejo teaches classes in Theories of Contemporary Art in undergraduate degree courses and Theory of Art and Neuro-linguistic Programming in the Master in Art Education in social and cultural institutions at the School of Fine Arts at UCM.
More information at actividades.ca2m@madrid.org or at 912 760 227
(18:00: lecturas en la biblioteca)
This course, tirelessly twirling and entranced, we will continue revolving around doubts and the astonishment induced by the inexplicable: what is art and what is not art.
Espacio mutante. Fotografía: María Eugenia Serrano Díez
After a long slow time spent in conversations and encounters with amateur collectors connected with the museum, we are now launching a publication about some of the things they have been telling and showing us. We invite you to read, observe and get involved in these collections.
Agua de Borrajas is a publishing project created by CA2M’s education department in conjunction with the Roma printers.
After a long slow time spent in conversations and encounters with amateur collectors connected with the museum, we are now launching a publication about some of the things they have been telling and showing us. We invite you to read, observe and get involved in these collections.
