Education

Our interest in these temporary encounters is to focus on the construction of knowledge through experience, rather than on the transmission of knowledge. We will start from the viewers’ point of view and how they see art at present. This will allow us to turn this time into a space for encounter in which the participants are not objects receiving an education, but subjects who collectively develop a critical discourse on contemporary works of art. In this way, visits will focus on a limited number of works in order to give rise to a more profound and open reflection, thus avoiding the more superficial exhibition itinerary and the idea of a single discourse. 

Welcome to Una Vibración Casi Imperceptible (‘An Almost Imperceptible Vibration’), a positional, performed visit that uses the audio guide as a tool to explore the exhibition put together by the artist Jon Mikel Euba, Animals That Bear the Weight of Mysterious Loads in Settings Created by Opposing Forces.

We invite you to enter a choreographed landscape that comes into existence as we walk through it and asks: where does your body end and this landscape begin? An experience to relive the past, time to hear, see and perceive what is vibrating and not visible to the naked eye, to stop before a reflection or an impulse, to ask ourselves: what is this landscape doing to us?

The body has no eyelids; it is a porous membrane that absorbs sensory stimuli and turns them into experience and knowledge. Shall we go for a walk? Bring your headphones.

Activating impulses, working from the experiential, promoting critical attitudes through action, involving the body in the learning processes and questioning social institutions. The CA2M Museum’s Department of Education and Public Activities is developing a line of work aimed at putting together themed visits in which artists and creatives are invited to bring the exhibitions closer to the visitors through their own artistic practices. This allows us to eschew the presumption of objectivity in the narratives put forward by the exhibitions by offering a break with hegemonic discourses. A space for research in which to encourage one’s own readings of the image and story, resulting in the creation of new archetypes.

Paulina Chamorro. I am a researcher, creative, performer and cultural manager. I work in the field of the performing arts in Latin America and Spain. I continuously collaborate with artists, collectives and institutions on projects that promote research and the creation of transdisciplinary dramatic languages engaged with contemporary issues.

REGISTRATION: By telephone on 91 276 02 21, by e-mail at ca2m@madrid.org or in person at the museum reception.

In recent years, the department has been working together with the educational community at Federico García Lorca CEIP. This experience has allowed us to rethink the ways in which relationships are established between the school and the museum. We are aware of the importance of creating a working group to develop innovative practices related to demanding, committed and long-lasting art education.

This school year, we will continue to investigate together through the Artist at Work Here programme, in which artists carry out a project in collaboration with the school community: teachers, pupils and families.

Given the phasing out of art education in formal education, it seems essential to us to continue to carry out these projects in educational institutions as tools with which to confront the prevailing attitudes. One of the basic aims of this project is to reflect on the power of the long-term projects carried out by artists to affect us. In this sense, we are interested in investigating how artists can affect the educational institution and, conversely, how educational institutions, state schools in particular, can give back to artists and the very education department in terms of experience.

This year, Belén Rodríguez will be the artist invited to carry out a project with the pupils of Federico García Lorca CEIP in Móstoles.

Last year, together with the boys and girls who reside at the Móstoles Children’s Home, fantasised about making a home inside our own tree house. We imagined what its shape would be like, what we would do inside it and what would happen around it.  

Some time later, in a conversation with the teachers at the Pablo Neruda UFIL, we saw the importance of learning by doing, and we assessed the need to turn educational spaces into places where real-life projects can be put into practice. We then thought it would be exciting to involve the Carpentry Department at the college in the construction of the house imagined by that group of children. 

We at the education department like to think that we can all take part in the construction of the world around us, so in January we will begin a process of collaboration with both groups to conceive, design and make this powerful image possible. 

For this purpose, we invited the designer Curro Claret to activate and guide us through this process. A long-distance dialogue that aims to rethink the idea of home and expand the concept of home and family. This creative process will be completed in early summer with the installation of the little house in the garden of the children’s home. 

Curro Claret. As a designer, Curro Claret’s interest lies in how people can participate in defining and building their environment by making use of their circumstances in a balanced and respectful way. His work often involves connecting a particular project with different groups of people. 

Facilitated by: Adriana Reyes, Carolina Sisabel and Manuela Pedrón Nicolau. 

Thickets emerge everywhere, in seemingly hostile or meaningless terrain, with the ability to feed on what they can find to create a highly resilient system. Some take root around edges: for instance, where a stone falls on rough, dry ground. Their presence both camouflages and blurs the boundaries between objects that sustain their spontaneous and intense growth. By examining its internal cohesion, we are able to review knowledge that can only ever exist in that place. In this sense, a thicket is never just a thicket. Within it lies a unique network of knowledge, of resistances, of desires, of connections, of nourishment, of form: a soup through which its close and intimate materials take root. A way to the knowledge that comes with growing in whatever way it can.

The new edition of the Open University is dedicated to communication with non-human life forms, the knowledge that these connections offer us and their possibilities in sensible production. A diverse group of guests will show us different forms of knowledge and methods that intersect in the territory closest to us, the one we inhabit, and from there we will draw on them, not from the fallacy of the autochthonous, but from simultaneity. In them and between them, there is friction, overlaps, clashing codes and the assimilation of imposed forms in a combination of experiences, languages and bodies. Here, artistic, technological and ritual practices are called on to allow exploration of ways of accessing the knowledge that relationships with other forms of life and spirituality make possible in order to understand our environment. We rely on a metabolic type of learning, which assimilates and deforms, to set up an experimental session in the Open University, to walk through the facility, to snoop around the edges and to savour concoctions. 

As a prelude to each of these sessions, we will meet half an hour before each session in different spaces of the museum to share readings and experiment with the ingestion of plants.

The CA2M Museum designs a series of training activities in contemporary art and thought in the tradition of open universities. These courses address some of the considerations that are fundamental for the understanding and interpretation of art in the present day. They are structured into two parts: the first consisting of the presentation of a topic by a guest lecturer, and the second posing questions for debate that allow the audience to take the floor. This structure may change to favour more experimental formats depending on the guest lecturer at each session.

You can apply for course accreditation, which requires attendance at 5 of the sessions.

Thicket is a continuous process of investigation that systematises the times, ideas and experiences shared in recent years by the team comprising Manuela Pedrón Nicolau, Carolina Sisabel and Adriana Reyes through artistic practices and friendship.

Manuela Pedrón Nicolau is a curator and educator in contemporary art. Her work particularly deals with questions related to artistic research and forms of narration that explore the social and political aspects of this field. She is particularly interested in the more ritual dimension of artistic practices, an interest shared with Adriana Reyes that has led them to become facilitators of this experimental session. Something we don’t know we know, but we do know. She was a member of the Catenaria collective, and together with Jaime González Cela has curated exhibitions at different centres and directed programmes of activities, such as CRÁTER at the Sala de Arte Joven in Madrid, VENECIA at La Casa Encendida and Tabacalera//Educa at Tabacalera Promoción del Arte. She has held art residencies at the Royal Academy of Spain, Rome; Hangar, Barcelona; and Centro Huarte, Pamplona.

Adriana Reyes Rosón is an anthropologist and creative in the field of living arts. She has a master’s degree in feminist studies, undertaken specialist studies in sexualities and diversity, and has trained with different creatives in Spain, Brazil and Portugal. She is interested in social sciences, the living arts, transfeminist studies, spiritualities and forms of plant life, diverse fields that are also sources of pleasure and action in her daily practice.

Carolina Sisabel has a degree in architecture and a master’s in psychoanalysis and the theory of culture. Her field of interest encompasses both landscape painting and dream states in relation to the intermediate, ambiguous, subterranean and unconscious zones at the crossroads between architectural-urban space and the psyche. Her creative practice ranges from architecture and the performing arts to writing and publishing, and she exhibits and publishes on platforms in Canada, Switzerland, France and Chile. In Spain, she has collaborated on several projects with Adriana Reyes, writing three publications dedicated to metabolic documentation, as well as a great friendship.

PROGRAMME

• 22 February. [...] vamo pal monte Palo Yaya (‘Let’s go to the bush, Palo Yaya’). José Ramón Hernández 
• 1 March. Rediscovering the plant spirit: relationships between plants, lands and individuals. Júlia Carreras Tort
• 15 March. You. Clara Montoya and Teresa Vicente.
• 22 March. Reverse agential (dis)orientations (or any which way) Laura Benítez Valero.
• 29 March. Healing plants. Collective transvestite contrabotanic invocation. Iki Yos Piña and Cacao Díaz.
• 12 April. The thing is not to think too much, but to give a lot of love. El Primo de Saint Tropez and the Discalced Carmelite Nuns of Toro (Zamora).

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.