Educational Community

Hearing is widely believed to be the most invasive of our senses, because it is almost impossible to prevent a powerful noise from penetrating our body. We can stop ourselves from looking, from tasting, from touching and even from smelling. But we cannot deactivate our hearing even while asleep. In addition, the hearing involves the whole body: the deep sounds of techno music make the whole body vibrate, pop music forces you to move your feet and it is even claimed that classical music can soothe wild beasts. But our relationship with sound responds to a cultural construct: if the sound of a cow mooing in the countryside is not considered to be noisy, then why do we think that the sound of a car in the city is?

In this workshop we will be borrowing from the Situationists to rethink what noises have to tell us and how they relate to our everyday experience. Hearing, the drift, the museum and the city will be our main tools to explore the limits of sound.

Maximum 30 students.

This project is based on the need to work with the communities close to the museum through ongoing activities that will create long-lasting, stable and flexible relations. For the fifth year running we are organising a laboratory for creative after-school hours for students in the third cycle of primary school. This year we are focusing on exploring the possibilities of dance as a political practice of activation of the body by means of bodily patterns already incarnated in infancy. While the question “what is dance?” proffers a multitude of possible responses, our specific question is “what is it like to dance at the age of eleven?”. Every Tuesday ¡ after school the children in the local neighbourhood can attend a special space where it will be their own bodies that dictate the rules.

Marisa Amor  is a dancer and choreographer, and has participated in the creation of various shows aimed at adults and children. She collaborates in improvisation projects with musicians, dancers and artists from other disciplines. She dedicates a large part of her practice to children and teenagers with classes, workshops, cultural exchanges, shows and educational projects associated mainly with dance and movement. She works with and for various collectives including persons with mental disabilities.

For the 2015-2016 school year the El Banquete group and the pupils from sixth year undertook the collective construction of a pyramid in a corner of the Juan Pérez Villaamil public school in Móstoles. Its mission was to generate a space that would afford other ways of inhabiting and rethinking utopia. The pyramid was built as a possibility for establishing other orders, a space of fluctuating collaborations in which to build and rebuild.

For the current school year of 2016-2017, a new group of pupils from sixth year will be in charge of the construction and deciding on its use. Once again this year, El Banquete will carry out a project at the school in which play will be given a transformative role, giving students an opportunity to adopt roles that will open up processes of reflection on identity, territoriality, the public sphere, autonomy, power, negotiation and disobedience. The project is underpinned by an interest in generating an autonomous and self-managed pedagogy from a position of conflict, at once creating a space of friction within the educational institution, where pupils will take decisions collectively for the self-construction and self-management of the space.

LAlejandría Cinque, Raquel G.Ibáñez and Marta van Tartwijk are the members of the El Banquete research and creative group which develops projects related with everyday experience as an artistic value. Their projects are addressed as playful appropriations and subjective experiences that wish to act as triggers for reflection, critical thinking and individual empowerment.

During this school year María Jerez, accompanied by an artist who does not speak Spanish, will attend the school with the intention of getting the children to teach the language to this “illiterate” individual; as such, this process will turn the usual logic and roles of teaching inside out. For this project, the artist and her companion will explore along with the children how a language can arise from the encounter between people who do not speak the same language. During the process, the wish to break down the distance separating them will make it possible to communicate between different worlds. This artist’s residency will seek to develop a “third language” derived from the impossibility of immediate communication, and to this end they will explore the inefficacy of language in situations where translation does not exist, where teaching and learning take place at the same time, where nobody is in control of the teaching process, where there is an exploration of fragility and roles are reversed, in order to discover things within failure and to make the most of and enjoy mistakes.

María Jerez is an artist who uses a borderline language in her practice because it allows her to be more mobile. In fact, she likes speaking through others. She builds like Lego and takes a kamikaze approach to rebuilding. In her first piece she turned her back on the public in order to see reality from a different angle and be able to position herself in many places at once. In the second piece she built a space where everybody could fit. In the third she appears in two dimensions. In the fourth she disappears. In the fifth she is expanded. In the sixth she is transformed into Alma de Rímel.

Following the experience during the 2014–2015 school year, this year we will continue and expand the Artist At Work program in which the artists develop an art project in collaboration with the local community in a school, including teachers, students and families. In the face of the disappearance of art classes within the official school curriculum we believe that it is an interesting artistic challenge to bring artists to schools with the purpose of developing multidisciplinary projects that work with materials that are not generally associated with art practice. One of the main goals of the project is to think about the possible long-term effects of projects developed by artists. In this regard, we are interested in researching into how artists can affect schools and vice versa, how educational institutions, and more specifically public schools, can return the experience to the artists and to the CA2M education department.

Can silence be fun? In this one-session school workshop Nilo Gallego and Magda Labarga will help us to explore the possibilities of listening, rhythm and noise, as well as their connections with the city and urban life.

The workshop activity comprises different stops or stations: in the listening room everything will be amplified: Did you pay attention to the friction of your clothes? And to the hairs on your head hitting against one another? Or the symphony of the zip opening your coat? In the sonic viewpoint we will look out over the city and experiment with its sounds and compose the rhythm of passersby. In the noise room, after listening to the soundtrack of our day-to-day life, the Noise and the City orchestra will rehearse for a street procession. There, other voices will emit new signals, accompanied by pots and pans, cans and whistles, proposing other rhythms for our neighbourhoods.

This activity is aimed at primary school students and their teachers, who will have a chance to take part in an action in which communication exists but in another form and attention is based on other forms of logic different to what we are used to. What would happen if we didn’t ask for silence for the span of two hours?

Nilo Gallego is a musician who gives performances in which experimentation with sound is the starting point. His works, which are always based on a playful component, are based the participation of the audience and interaction with our surroundings and with the everyday.

Magda Labarga was born without realising it and then later, given that she had been born, she learned to talk. She grew to like being born but especially this talking thing. That’s why she dedicates herself to storytelling: for having being born and for the pleasure of telling things.  She has been telling stories for years and talking her whole life.

Max 30 students.

As part of our ongoing long-term policy, this school year we ran three artist residencies in three public schools on the outskirts of Madrid: María Jerez in CP Parque Aluche, the El Banquete collective in CP Juan Pérez Villamil and Amalia Fernández in CP Beato Simón de Rojas, these last two in Móstoles.

In the face of the growing disappearance of art courses in the official state curriculum, we believed that it would be an interesting challenge to introduce artists into schools with the purpose of developing projects which involve materials that, in principle, are not normally associated with art practice. We were interested in exploring how artists can influence schools and, vice versa, how the school can pass on its experience to the artists and also the education department here at CA2M.

Working in parallel to the educational project, Mercedes Álvarez undertook research into the potential of the working model developed by the art centre’s educational team with artists and teachers. On this occasion, the emphasis of the parallel research has taken various experimental approaches, questioning the very model of evaluation within culture. A publication with the results for last years’ course is available at Between the Museum and the School

In this seminar, all the participating agents in the project — artists, teachers, educators and researchers — will present the projects undertaken and we will evaluate their impact and contents.

4 minutes and 300 metres is all that separates us from the nearest public school. The closeness with the art centre means that its teachers, students, and parents are part of the very fabric of the museum itself. Right from the beginning, we believed that it was critical for us to work with the schools in our area of influence in the development of projects that would lead to a shared space of research. And so, for the third year running, we are continuing to strengthen bonds by collaborating with the Beato Simón de Rojas public school as part of our artist-in-residence project. The proposals will conceive other forms of productivity removed from those which schools are used to. For the first year we invited Pili Álvarez to come up with an audiovisual project that would rethink the school’s immediate surrounding environs, the experiences that take place there and the relational problems that arise in its classrooms. For the second year Amalia Fernández worked with the body to explore issues related with identity and desire both inside and outside the classroom. This year we wish to continue investigating how artists can affect the educational institution and, more specifically, how this public school can return its experience to artists as well as to CA2M’s education department.

This school year we are beginning a new long-term relationship with the Manuel Núñez Arenas public school in Vallecas. The artist-in-residence project will be based on dialogue with the school’s team of teachers and the parents who are actively involved with the school. The artist will first take some time to get acquainted with how the school is run and its people and then connect it with his/her own artistic research. For this reason, the residency project will address issues of social justice, the core theme for the activities at Nuñez Arenas this year.

The project will involve the whole school, focusing on the work of two different years in primary school as well as the parents who wish to be involved. Together we will all imagine new forms of functioning and of intervention in the space in a primary school.

CA2M has invited the filmmaker Pili Álvarez and the researcher Mercedes Álvarez to undertake research on the project by the El Banquete collective within its Artist at Work artist-in-residence programme. The goal is to produce an audiovisual work that will examine the project’s critical and practical challenges. It is viewed as a kind of device for the critical analysis of an art project at a school. The film will be based on sequences recorded as live cinema that follow up the main characters: teachers, artists, educators and students.

As the students begin to appropriate the space and the pyramid begins to gain in presence, conflicts start to arise that not only affect the children involved in the construction of the pyramid. The frictions question other agents in the school that are affected by the autonomy of the group that inevitably questions the existing power structures in the school.

This audiovisual proposal looks into film’s ability to evince and to take part in educational processes and thus multiply the ways in which practices that operate on an relational level can be followed, shared and explored.

The process of postproduction will be finished during this school year and the film will be presented and distributed in 2017.

Programme for primary schools with the support of Fundación Daniel y Nina Carasso

Can silence be fun? In this one-session school workshop Nilo Gallego and Magda Labarga will explore the possibilities of listening and of noise, as well as their connections with the urban space and life in society. What does listening to the city mean? Is it possible to listen in the middle of chaos? What different kinds of silence are there? How many different kinds can we listen to? In this third edition of the workshop we will be looking to expand the limits imposed up until now in the practice and will push back new boundaries for silence. Operating in parallel to The Triangle project, the Noise and the City workshop will partake in the reflections that arise and will establish a dialogue on the various forms that silence can adopt in the school space.

The session is divided into different stations or stops. First of all, everything is amplified in the Listening Room. Have you paid attention to your clothes rubbing together? Have you listened to the hairs on your head as they hit off one another? Or to the symphony produced by the zip on your coat? In the Sonic Viewing Room we will take a look at the city and experiment with its sounds and use them to compose the rhythm of passers-by walking on the streets. In the Noise Room, after listening to the soundtrack of our everyday lives, the Noise and the City orchestra will rehearse for a street parade. In it, other voices that emit new slogans, accompanied by pots and pans and whistles, will propose other rhythms for our neighbourhoods.

This activity is aimed at groups of primary school children and their teachers, who will have an opportunity to take part in an action in which communication exists, but in an alternative way, and where attention is based on logics other than conventional ones: What would happen if adults didn’t ask us to be quiet for the next two hours?