Educational Community

During this 20-hour workshop, CA2M keeps on its line of work focusing on education and reflection regarding the educative uses of bodywork and  performance language. Guided by Norberto Llopis, we will reflect on education and art as political practices, intending to trigger new impulses and searches for new forms of imagination not under control yet. The practice will revolve around some concepts: the concept of performative act, the concept of affection and the power one.

 “Performative” act

In practamatic, the philosopher J.L. Austin explains that language is not pure, a mere instrument of symbolic communication used to transfer meanings, therefore, language can be also studied at a “performative” level, being usually an example of act of promising. Promising, not in the sense of a communication of a subjective intension of performing what it is promised, promising is an act in itself, independent even from what it was promised to finally be performed.

This practice invites us to focus on the performative aspect of our proposals. What are we doing?, What does what we are doing?, of course, I would not want falling into dogmatism, since meanings also “perform”.

Affect and power

“By affect I understand affections of the body by which the body's power of acting is increased or diminished, aided or restrained, and at the same time, the ideas of these affections…”

Barush Spinoza, Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order

Much has been said about affection, but it has not always been considered, as the aforesaid, the power or the possibility that this affect aids or restrains. Putting aside the dimension of power (in a broad sense, as restrained power as enabling, discrediting, impellenting), to some extent, the action of work is denied, limiting affections towards contemplative windows where the action goes no further than their contemplative frame.

What does it give? What does it take? What can it get? What does it want? What does it do? No place for innocence, the intensity of affection doesn´t give a certificate of innocence, like it would be like saying “this affection does not affect”. Willing to generate a discussion environment during this workshop, do not take for granted or dogmatize the concepts we start from.

Instruments

By applying different exercises and instruments to analyze and to approach to our practice by means of affection, action and power, as well as to elude mere discursive or narrative dramas: use of maps as a means to apply strategies to affect in a way to restrain other ways; use of objects as a means of materializing or objecting affects, the affects as that simulation that objects perform: and the use or creation of dictionaries that help us to understand the extension of the affects to work with.

It is a Wave, it transports perturbations in space, it will go far, 13 nomadic horsepower, new battery, it has always slept in a garage, tuned to the max, you can choose whether to pass the MOT or head for the hills, any intermediate options are also negotiable, suffice to hear it hum, it just needs a little servicing, its only fault is that it is always going off on a tangent. Ideal for excursions and short spins, getting lost among the crowd and trading cards. It includes an incomplete toolbox and drifter’s maps. Come and see it, no strings attached.

Nilo Gallego is a musician whose performances use sound as their starting point. His work, which always has a playful component, seeks the participation of the audience and interaction with the context and the everyday. He plays the drums, percussion and electronic music.

This new education project consists of thinking about the patios in education centers and possible interventions in them. These leisure spaces can provide the perfect context from which to reflect on the educational experience and the problems inherent to their architecture at present. Over the course of these months, and through a number of sessions, we will look at the needs of various centers, the invisible powers that govern these spaces and the possibility and importance of transforming them.

The artist, Bárbara Fluxá has been developing a multidisciplinary art project that revolves around an analysis of the construction of the territory as a cultural «landscape». This is why the places in which she puts together her works take on such importance as the genesis and very object of both the artistic and theoretical analysis, at the same time.

VISIT AND TALK ON PER/ FORM. HOW TO DO THINGS WITH (OUT) WORDS
Apart from visiting the Per/form exhibition with the teachers, we will also reflect on the concept of performativity in the museum and its ability to generate knowledge. On this occasion, together with the teachers we will analyze the dynamics of performance!, a joint activity with secondary school groups on this exhibition.

To plan a performance as if it were a crime. To choose the location, to think about the attitudes, to consider possible setbacks, and to set our watches are only some of the actions and decisions we need to tackle. Once the script is done, coordination among the performers is essential, as well as the negotiation of unforeseen factors. We will dedicate the whole week of the workshop to the planning of this action, and to its later execution, as well as to analyzing and discussing the implications of this kind of performances, where, despite having calculated all factors, the audience is captive, since there is no predetermined way for the action, and the place where it happens is full of unforeseen factors, since it is the public space. We will also analyze works by other artists who have, at some point, "perpetrated" happenings, like Allan Kaprow for Calling, Oscar Massota in The Helicopter or Katerina Seda, Alex Reynolds or Dora García herself in some of her works.

Dora García is an artist whose work is focused on the creation of situations that can de-construct conventions and codes of behavior, especially between the work, the artist, and the spectator. Whether she works in the public sphere, in museums or in galleries, her work explores Brecht's theater, Artaud's impact, but also characters like Lenny Bruce, Jack Smith, or Guy de Cointet. She has researched areas from the inadequate as a mode of dissidence to the role of art practice in the configuration of subjectivity, as well as the questioning of the categories of health and illness.

Since 2009, we have been running a summer performance workshop aimed at teachers, educators, and artists interested in education, with the desire to establish bonds of collaboration, to reflect together with the educators at the Center, the teachers, the assistants, and the guest artist on educational processes and the performative aspect of education. After the workshops with Los Torreznos, Tania Bruguera, Pere Faura, Itziar Okariz, Norberto Llopis and Nilo Gallego, we are planning a new summer performance workshop, in this case, with Dora García.

Please send this registration form (download) up until the 7th of July to educación.ca2m@madrid.org .

More information at educacion.ca2m@madrid.org and at 912760227.

The dance technique of Contact Improvisationwas introduced during the seventies and then began to spread worldwide in the following decade of the eighties. It was created by Steve Paxton who wanted to fly but, logically, knew that the first thing was to learn how to fall together with other bodies, and to this end he started to combine principles of dance with gymnastics and martial arts like Aikido.

The basic principle of this technique is for the dancers to maintain a physical point of contact with each other, sharing their centre of gravity, rejecting verticality and individuality in order to enter into a kind of co-existence, a communion based on trust and the will to discover new patterns of movement.

In this workshop Aimar Pérez Galí will introduce the basics of Contact Improvisationto help rethink strategies that will aid us in developing pedagogical tools. Taking this practice as an example of the politics of caring, we can open up new fields of exploration around the body, its uses, its connotations and its implications on a social, political and cultural level.

Aimed at teachers and all those interested in education.No prior experience is necessary, but participants should dress comfortably and be willing to explore, sweat and touch, and to share weight and minds

Enrolment free until 23 June.Download form, fill it in and return it to educacion.ca2m@madrid.org Participants will be confirmed on 27 June

This workshop will be taking a critical approach to some of the possibilities for creative action that the open spectrum of identity brings to artistic practices today. New subjectivities are beginning to adopt a stance, proudly accepting their abjectness, and this enables them to structure their own discursive fields of action. These empowered attitudes are radically transforming presentation and representation in art.

The workshop will take the form of a walkthrough that explores some of the manifold narrative possibilities afforded by the new visual configuration which has emerged following a shift in identity politics. The journey will follow various paths through art practices in search of the transformation of collective portraits.

A few years ago we started a collaboration project with teachers from the Enterarte group. What started out as a teacher training course here at the museum has grown into a project on education between equals in which knowledge flows from the two parts: the educators at the museum and the school teachers. This is true to the extent that we not only share visits to exhibitions (inside and outside the museum) and artist workshops with Azucena Vieites, the Colektivof collective, Bárbara Fluxá and Fernando Sánchez Castillo; but also, at the same time, Enterarte adds to the activities at CA2M and brings the everyday reality and experience of schools in order to help us grow as an education department.

http://blogenterarte.blogspot.com.es/

Experience-based practices involve a much higher level of learning that those focused on the transmission of given knowledge. That is why, at the end of the academic year we organise a summer workshop for teachers with the goal of exploring the educational potential of action and ways of constructing knowledge that can come from action.

Leave the studio, take over the whole of space, break with the general tone, lower the tension of the opening act, sleep with the doors open, remove a brick from the wall, deactivate a safety protocol, give way to a stranger, darken the path, leave before time, assimilate the outdoor temperature, hang around the rooftops, cut through the forest tonight, bridge the gap, take over a platform, stick your nose into something, increase the flow of a river, lose oneself along the way, tie loose ends, go in the backdoor, put yourself in someone else’s place, don’t do it, lay a bridge, remove the fence from a plot of land, go back home, open a permanent hole, change closed for open, flood the centre, leave the classroom, repeal the rules and regulations, fly to the present… Luz Broto’s proposals often activate unknown dimensions, emphasising exploration as a tool for discovering a given environment and action as a motor for new experiences that approach the individual to the collective.

This workshop proposes working together for a week with all the “ifs and buts” that surround us, those that limit the possibilities for movement in our everyday spaces, in our workplaces, and in our own bodies.

This workshop has been held previously with artists like Los Torreznos, Tania Bruguera, Pere Faura, Itziar Okariz, Norberto Llopis, Nilo Gallego, Dora García and Aimar Pérez Galí.

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Schools are places where forms of interrelating and identity are produced. At times, the classroom is governed by a set of rules based on a binary vision of gender, sex and sexuality that limit any other possibility of being in the world. School is not only a place for transmitting learning, but also a place where we learn what things should be like, and what can and cannot be done. This reality is based on a homogenising and normalising ideology that underpins the space and relationships. How can teachers intervene to question this experience of normalisation and ensure that the classroom is a place where each individual can express him or herself freely?

Conscious of the difficulty and the importance of working with these issues in schools, this year we wanted to convey what we have learned in the queer workshops with students to this space for teachers, and to generate new forms of learning through practice. With the help of queer pedagogy and certain artistic strategies, we will imagine ways of joint construction of a classroom where diverse subjectivities coexist and where sexual, racial, functional, religious and other forms of difference are not viewed as a problem. Staying clear of any form of essentialism that reproduces exclusion and violence, we will address how queerness shows us that the order we have naturalised is not fixed, that our positions change and can be displaced and are full of possibilities.

Minimum of 4 people per group

Aimed at teachers and people interested in education

La Casa is a large, broad, diverse, complex and elaborate project full of ramifications, formats and works, which Aitana Cordero has been working on for the last three years.
 

La Casa is a quest, a deal, an adventure, a disaster of one’s own making, a practice that refutes that “always is never possible.”
 

The intimacy of touching a space and allowing a space to touch you. The art of demolition, the choreography involved in laying foundations, the movement of the bird building its nest, the consistency of ruins. Destruction as a constructive ritual.

This workshop or encounter proposes corporal training around the notion of building and living in togetherness. We will relate these practices to our experience in the classroom or in educational or learning spaces, taking into account not only the “what”, but also the “how.”

We’ll play with notions such as the physicality of building, the creation of spaces, the inhabitable, home, collaboration, intimacy, tiredness, repetition and cooking.

Touching, smelling, moving, studying, questioning, updating ourselves, we will construct and knock down ideas and spaces, as a practice aimed at being together, as a way to recycle a certain hope and create a new meaning of what could be inhabitable.

We’ll ask ourselves these questions

What alternative spaces could emerge from the confrontation of shared wishes and from the action of building and breaking?
Where will that leave comfort, roots, intimacy, sharing?
What if putting down roots were a three-dimensional activity, also in motion?
What if our fluids were able to put together bricks that will later be walls, rooms, buildings, streets, neighbourhoods, cities, countries, continents, worlds, universes, constellations…?
In this workshop we will walk, sweat, dance, build, destroy, invent corners, hideouts, shells and amulets, we’ll taste, there will be silences, hollows, voids, tiredness and many objects.

Aitana Cordero is choreographer, creator, performer and pedagogue. Since 2000 she has been developing her own projects as pieces, installations, performances, choreographies, events, films, videos, texts, cooking proposals, and “things”, which she has presented in many European, North-American and Asian cities. Since 2001 she combines her research and artworks with an intense teaching activity in private schools and universities. She also creates theatre works and “company and observation” in processes of other choreographers or creators. You can find her many universes here: www.aitanacordero.com
 

In previous years we held performance and education workshops with Los Torreznos, Tania Bruguera, Pere Faura, Itziar Okariz, Norberto Llopis, Nilo Gallego, Dora García, Aimar Pérez Galí and Luz Broto.

Two 2-hour sessions, times to be decided with the group

Minimum of 4 people per group

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To meet up, to write, to speak, to read an extract, a sentence, a word, to keep silent, to get up and go to the blackboard, to dither … to think about school once and once again. Then remember that situation and share it. Search for the crossovers between queer and education. Look at the rules, the ones we put in place, and do the opposite …

This year we wish to continue the meetings with teachers we begun last year in order to continue thinking from a practical viewpoint about new ways of imagining the classroom, school subjects and bodies. To keep altering the order we believe to be natural and immutable. To keep imagining new positions.

Aimed at teachers in nursery, primary, secondary, third-level and non-regulated education.

More information on educacion.ca2m@madrid.org / 912 760 225