Education

Aimed at anyone interested in taking part

With The Last Letter is Q, Changing Name and Project Q, this year we continue our exploration of queer research and pedagogies, which we began some years ago now. Things have changed considerably since we first started out on this path with the Painting Your Nails workshop: the educational community, the social and cultural context, politics and social movements… This period of transformations has brought to the fore a series of new doubts and challenges when it comes to undertaking queer work within schools.

With Changing Name, this year we are continuing our work with high-school students on narratives of gender identity and the concept of normalcy from a feminist and queer perspective. The Last Letter is Q, a workshop for teachers, brings together various professionals who collectively imagined a queer school.
 

Finally, Project Q is an online reference space where we can find (and get lost in) materials and all kind of information about queerness. This space has been created with the idea of offering a living, provisional, unstable place.
 

In this open encounter we will share experiences with the intention of continuing collectively rethinking the potentialities of queer practice in its meeting with education.
 

To enrol and for more information contact educacion.ca2m@madrid.org / (+34) 912 760 227

First of all, we should explain that besides meaning ‘crazy’ or ‘mad’, the Spanish word loca from the title of this workshop “Volvernos Loca” is also used to describe “effeminate” homosexual men and is roughly equivalent to the English terms ‘sissy’ or ‘flaming queen’.

Sometimes when we are really interested or enthusiastic about something we say that we are “mad” to do it. This “going mad” is also a queer space where we stop being who we were and do what we have never done before.

It takes very little to make us go mad: a body, desire, to imagine how, what, when, and also a little bit of listening. To go out onto the streets together and run, run like mad. Go mad at school, in class, in the museum. Mad with joy, with pleasure, with longing to have a good time. Going mad so as not to end up mad.

A two-session workshop using action and performance to think from a queer perspective about ways of being that are beyond binary categories and fixed definitions of identity.

Final cycle of secondary school.

Schedule: the first 2-hour session to be arranged with the school. The second session from 11:00 to 13:30 at CA2M.

Maximum number of students: 30.

In this workshop the groups will work with art’s capacity to transform time and space. Over the course of the various sessions the class will be turned into a room and the museum into a house. The students will turn off the lights, remove the desks and dance. They will visit the most intimate corners of the museum and together they will build a shelter.

Last year, the performing artist Aitana Cordero designed this workshop in which we will discover how hard it is to work with intimacy in secondary schools and, at once, just how important it is to do so.

Times: the first two two-hour sessions at school and the third open-ended session at CA2M to be agreed with the teacher.

Maximum number of students: 30.

There are unused ceramic kilns in the storeroom for the sculpture workshop at the Europa secondary school. When we asked about them we were told that, back in the early 1990s, a group of teachers managed to introduce a Visual Arts course at the school. They spoke nostalgically about when the arts building was built and about the long teachers’ meetings to discuss experimental ideas they would introduce in the classrooms.

It strikes us as incredibly important to try to bring back this passion, especially at a time when art is being pushed out of the curriculum at schools. This year we want to start a project together with José Luis, Mercedes and Carmen (art teachers at the Europa secondary school) so that the students can create their own space for creativity. A place where they can turn on the kilns once again, increase the number of hours in creating, and defend the importance of art.
 

PHASE ONE: collaboration project between the CA2M library, Education department and IES Europa secondary school

A box of fanzines published by women, a shelf of books classified by weight or by colour, an envelope with minimum publications... A library can be almost anything.

This school year, along with Sonia and Andrea, the librarians at CA2M, we will begin a collaborative project to create an archive of art publications with art students at IES Europa secondary school: a strange, unsuspected library created from holdings discarded from the CA2M library. Students will take discarded books, catalogues and fanzines on a journey to the art classes at IES Europa. Once they find themselves in their new emplacement, we will start to think about and construct a collective archive where we will bring into question the conventional logic of a library in order to create a new archive narrative from materials which were initially rejected and which therefore are situated, from the outset, against the grain. The project seeks to develop new possibilities from creativity and resistance, to bring students into closer contact with contemporary creation and to create new bonds of collaboration between departments and institutions.The first activity will be a three-day workshop to create furniture in which we will jointly design and build an artefact or piece of furniture that will serve as both transport container and display case for the publications.

PHASE TWO: publishing with nothing

During the recent confinement we wanted to continue developing this project, even at a distance. For that purpose, we invited Andrea Galaxina to come up with a proposal to send to students. Taking the form of a tutorial, Andrea prepared a fanzine to explore the creative possibilities of self-publishing.

“In these strange times we are going through, when you cannot leave home to buy things, or perhaps you cannot leave home at all, it is important to realize that the materials we have at hand can open doors to fascinating worlds that perhaps, during our everyday lives, we don’t pay any real attention to. To create with nothing is a political and transformative action. And so too is publishing with nothing. The most subversive way of publishing in history is the fanzine. Furthermore, publishing fanzines allows us to expand our creativity. But we can also turn it into a vehicle to connect with others. Now that our interpersonal relationships have been seriously affected, we can take advantage of this state of emergency to introduce new ways of expressing ourselves and communicating with one another. That’s why in this guide I am going to show you how to make a fanzine with things that you probably have ready access to during confinement: ordinary everyday stationary materials with which we can nonetheless do extraordinary things. I will also give you a brief recap of the history and philosophy behind it and how to distribute our creations without leaving home".

Read Editar con nada. Una pequeña guía práctica (y un poco teórica) para hacer fanzines.

CURATED BY JULIA MORANDEIRA AND MANUEL SEGADE

La Escuelita at CA2M is an informal school, a living research organism transversal to the art centre that operates as a laboratory for non-traditional forms of production and transmission of knowledge. A programme of low intensity strange studies, a formless mass of experiences and knowledge, a device for promiscuous learning.

The issues addressed and the programmed debates are underwritten by the discursive urgency and desire that emerge from the context in which we work —CA2M and the region of Madrid— sending out explorative tentacles towards other ideas and practices. And so, in a symbiotic relation with the current exhibition programme focused largely on performativity, orality and the body, the second season of La Escuelita is based on the infrastructure set in place during the first edition in order to rethink the body around the catalysing concept of social choreographies. The term alludes to those forms of experimentation in the field of aesthetics that generate hitherto unforeseen social representations and ways of life. Social choreographies can therefore be understood as those places of cultural negotiation in which aesthetic norms are rehearsed and shared according to the social formations they produce. Or perhaps the opposite is true and it is the typologies of social interaction that are able to generate new artistic forms. In any case, these aesthetic political dances face us with an understanding of the individual and collective body as a contaminated archive of regimes of representation but also as the battlefield in other sensibilities and textures of history are negotiated, inscribed, interpreted and short-circuited.

The programme is made up of an interconnected mishmash of embodied histories, minor narratives and dissident gestures.

The various sessions will bring into play sonic, performative and corporal strategies of readings against the grain of History, that put forward radical fictions and imaginaries and recompose both the past and the future. They will focus on the intersectionality of gender, class and ethnicity, on the politics of dance and partying, and on the potentialities and material practices of style, glamour and nightlife. The discourse on affective economies in times of neoliberal malaise will also infect the programme, with a view to firing the imagination and creating coalitions.

All sessions are public and open. Anyone interested in joining La Escuelita, should send an email to recepcion.ca2m@madrid.org

SESSIONS

17 OCTOBER

History is a choreography threatened by every new pose

Introduction to the working lines of the second season, with the concept of social choreographies and the idea of radical performance.

24 OCTOBER

behind the red pool in the deep sea lie the soldiers, with Magui Dávila

Performative lecture-remix of sounds and resistances of an Atlantic musical geography which embraces industrial and rave techno to Afro-American and Latin-American sound systems throughout history.

Re-inscripción es un proyecto de publicación en curso, en fase de investigación y escritura. Ganador del Premi Miquel Casablanca, Barcelona, 2017.

31 OCTOBER

Counter-currents of Black Atlantic

Conversation on sonic fictions, cultural circulations and contaminated histories of the Black Atlantic.

7 NOVEMBER 

A History of Ha!, with Sabel Gavaldón

A journey through the timeline of remixes, appropriations and culture wars around the ballroom beat “Ha Dance”.

14 NOVEMBER

Ensayo Editorial vol. 1

First session in re-signification, translation, debate and collective writing of the constellation of key notions that compose social choreographies.

21 NOVEMBER

Reading Paris is Burning, with Manuel Segade

An essay on affective coalition based on oral and visual appropriations of ballroom, Latino and Afro-American voguing in the moment of the AIDS crisis in New York.

28 NOVEMBER

Re-inscriptions, with Diásporas Críticas.

Workshop in reading-performance on the intersection and inscription of virus, social control and politics of the body.

12 DECEMBER

Session with Rafa Marcos Mota

Exploration of material practices of glamour as rupture and potentiality of the body, desire, fantasy and appropriation from a subjective, sensitive and tangible perspective.

19 DECEMBER

Beauty Salon

Politics of style, make-up, hair and nails.