Educational Community

One day you get a message with a location. This location is the hiding place of a letter that somebody has written to you. This somebody, whose identity you don’t know, proposes an exclusive sound experience for you, a musical gift.
 

Can you make music by writing words? Hiding Place is a proposal to work with sound without making music, it is an unidentified action that only you and I know, a meeting without meeting.
 

Individually, we will write a letter for someone we don’t know, proposing a sound experience. We will then hide the letter somewhere in the city so that a person who is communicated the location can pick it up. But, bear in mind that another person might find the letter first. And, of course, you will also receive your letter in a hiding place.

With the audiovisual “Un número no es una palabra” (A number is not a word) the Las Lindes collective is presenting fragments of the research and experimentation it has been carrying out over the last three years. A collective film (and not a film by the collective) which, over and above a diagnosis of reality or debating concepts whose excessive use has eroded their meaning, is an invitation to do and to make. A series of exercises that implement ideas, bordering on the absurd, to throw themselves into play and, as we have come to expect from Las Lindes, creating debate.

The public presentation of this audiovisual will be the beginning of a new phase for the collective. The goal of this project together with the consequences, changes, tensions and losses that the pandemic has caused in the collective’s fields of exploration—art, cultural production and education—have already begun to suggest and provoke new and different approaches. And not so much for our capacity to adapt as much as a case of resistance. We are still convinced that even today it is necessary to conceive forms and spaces from which we can think and act together, now more than ever.

In short, Las Lindes have made a film that we want to show you this coming Friday 25 September. Even at the risk of not being understood, it steers clear of commonplaces in order to create a place in common and to look for ways of talking that avoid the traps of language.

Las Lindes is a research and action group working with education, art and cultural practices. Its members are Virginia Villaplana, María José Ollero, Diego del Pozo, Yera Moreno, Pablo Martínez, Marta de Gonzalo and Pili Álvarez.

A group of teachers and people interested in education who are also fascinated by audiovisuals decided to look out the window together. This is where we wanted to start, looking with fresh eyes, listening with attention to little things and touching film with our own hands.
 

This sowed a desire to continue the project into this school year. We want to share our educational practices, to experiment jointly so that we can then propose something different to our students, to create in order to continue learning.
 

If you are interested in audiovisuals and education, we encourage you to join our group which will meet monthly to discuss shared processes.

R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, Ñ, O, P, Q.
 

We are going to put ourselves in an unexpected position. It is possible that we end up teaching something that we didn’t know how to do before and somebody whistles loudly for the first time. This could lead to something odd and makes us think for a moment about ways of teaching removed from the academy and art, or that might drive us crazy trying to separate everything from the rules. Or maybe not. We are going to put ourselves in an unexpected position and see whether something changes.
 

The Last Letter is Q is a workshop for teachers exploring queer pedagogies and their derivations.
 

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

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

Minimum of 4 people per group.

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

Last year, along with Sonia and Andrea, the librarians at CA2M, we started a collaborative project to create an archive of art publications with art students at IES Europa secondary school and to investigate the possibilities for self-publishing. The project consisted in moving the discarded holdings from the CA2M library. Art students took the books, catalogues and fanzines to their classes. Once there, we started a process to construct the shelving for the library and to imagine other possible ways of activating it. However, the project was cut short by the confinement imposed because of COVID-19.
 

This year we propose picking up the project where we left off. To create a strange and unsuspected library based on these and other holdings. Together with the art students, we will rethink what a collective archive actually means and we will question the logic of a library in order to generate a new narrative. 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.
 

During confinement, we wanted to continue developing this project remotely. To this end, we invited Andrea Galaxina to think of a proposal to send to the students. Taking the form of a tutorial, Andrea prepared this fanzine to think of the creative possibilities of self-publishing.
 

Read Editar con nada. Una pequeña guía práctica (y un poco teórica) para hacer fanzines. (Publish with nothing. A brief practical (and a little theoretical) guide to making fanzines).

Two years ago, with the performing artist Aitana Cordero, we started a performance workshop focused on exploring the intimacy of adolescents within the classroom. We understand that now these relations mean something else and the performance forces us to ask ourselves new questions through action.

For this reason, this year it strikes us as absolutely necessary to continue placing desire at the very core in order to confront this uncertainty of the body that it is our lot to live through and perhaps to thus learn how to breathe better.

From the teachers’ room, the boiler room, the fire escape behind the building, the roof, or from whatever is behind the door at the end of the corridor. This workshop proposes entering those places at school where we have never been before and to reveal them through the camera as undiscovered settings you’ve never seen, or maybe you have, perhaps in a movie.

In autumn, taking advantage of the building work taking place in the museum, we will move our activities to extraordinary places where we can continue to think and create together. Intemperie (exposed to the elements) is a travel and expedition project outside the museum to work in the open air, exposed to the elements, to go for walks, to see daylight, to soak up whatever is out there. During these months we will go to see the stars, to workshops with artists and bookstores, take the train, climb mountains, camp, plant in the corners, read on paths and sing in the forest.

Outdoor projects:

Las Sin Nombre theatre group 

Under-21 Team

Universidad Popular

An amateur choir

Reading group

Roof terrace garden

Now that normality has finally become strange and we know that strange is normal, we want to celebrate it and continue thinking about it from our bodies (mine and others) and try out new ways of being and of being together. To see how we can touch each other without touching and, with the help of art, to infect each other with ideas, with ways of doing, copying each other, imitating what works for our well-being.
 

Now that everything can be different, we will support each other and create chains of queer transmission so that each one of us can be who they want to be and have their own space.
 

Divided into two sessions, this workshop experiments through action and performance.

“At first it seems like a particularly useless act, outlandish and out of the ordinary, but as one discovers that it is a mere manipulation of objects like any other it becomes easy and natural. Looking for barbiturates is like looking for aspirins for a cold and preparing the gas entails the same difficulties as preparing it for a shower.”
 

In 1967 the Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña founded Tribu No and penned the No Manifiesto, a text that proposed not-doing as an action. Starting in the month of March, we will organize a workshop-visit to Seehearing the Enlightened Failure, a retrospective exhibition by the visual artist, poet, filmmaker and activist. Aimed at groups of secondary school students, this activity will engage with the work and strategies of the Chilean artist in order to think and to act through her work.