Thinking

We will delve into the worlds proposed by Sol Calero and Santiago Sierra in the quest for the truth and provocativeness in performance, painting and installation. Using poetry, sound, taste and touch, Madrid Negro encourages us to walk through the different shows to reflect on the representation of racialised bodies in contemporary art.

On this immersive route, we will view the museum space through the metaphor of a plantation, where we will meet up with those who will accompany us in the different rooms to create a maroon network and build a plan to sabotage the colonial imaginary lurking behind art.

During this participatory investigation process, we will ask about the purpose of the works that feature our bodies and experiences. What is the basis of making us front and centre? What patterns are reproduced and what is the role of the artist as the executor of the piece?

Madrid Negro (María Paula Irizarry Gúzmán, Yeison F. García, Nieves Cisneros Pascual and Malcolm Riascos Bazán) is an artistic inquiry proposal based on studying the historical memory and contemporary heritage of Black people and Afro-descendants in the Community of Madrid.

A pond emerges
A frenetic sprouting of the phreatic
An invisible flow
There are holes in the history of this pond and each one is filled in their own way
Dug out by a giant
A gigantic company, a gigantic machine, a gigantic desire
And then nothing can dry it, but it will evaporateIf you stop nearby, you can sometimes hear a choir of children from a nearby bilingual public school learning the song the water cycle… 
When the children go back to school in September they are taken to the pond
They spend the morning sitting down, looking, they see that it is no longer there
They had visited the pond in February, collected samples of its crystal-clear water
And one evening in spring they went to listen to the frogs
An historian, a lawyer and an artist agree to start there.

Ciudad Sur is a shared experimental space begun in 2021 which, taking its starting point in Móstoles, wishes to explore the many faces and manifold riches that generate a sense of belonging in the cities within the metropolitan area of Madrid. Its second edition is called Brota invisible (Invisible Flow).

Brota invisible is aimed at all those interested in a shared rethinking of the inhabited space. Over the course of six sessions, spaced out between May and December 2022, we will explore the idiosyncrasy of Móstoles based on an omnipresent yet very often invisible element, which is water. Up until relatively recently, the people of Móstoles sourced their water locally, underground. This all changed when Móstoles connected to Isabel II canal water supply network. Taking our point of departure in this rupture, and all its ensuing implications, we will open the conversation. But there are also other elements in the various strata of the city that are forgotten about: the memory of those who are no longer with us and those that were silenced. And also the initiative of locals to decide how to build their own city. We will try to bring to the surface and throw light on some of these invisible flows, rivers that run underneath the ground we stand on, ponds that disappear and which, almost as if by magic, suddenly reappear.

The first session will take place on Tuesday 24 May and will consist of a walk which will start at CA2M at 6:00 pm. The following sessions will take place on 21 June, 27 September, 25 October, 22 November and 13 December. Each session will centre on this core theme as well as the interests suggested by participants. The enrolment form for the first session is already available.

AHIMOS (Amigos de la Historia de Mostoles, Friends of the History of Mostoles) is a relatively new association which came about with the purpose of investigating and promoting the past of this city in the Region of Madrid. Despite its newness, some of its members have been involved in these activities for almost twenty years, on a journey involving thousands of hours spent digging into archives and libraries, into excavations in search of treasure that nobody expected, of strolling streets and countryside to portray them as they are... and all with the goal of bringing the past customs, events and society closer to the local community today, in the hope that they will appreciate and feel a greater attachment to the place where they live.

Patricia Esquivias grew up in the suburbs on the outskirts of Madrid. Since she came of age she has lived in different cities, always searching in them for traces of local crafts and artisanship. Since 2005 she has mainly worked with video, a discipline she uses to share her narratives on history and the city. In 2016 she had a solo show at CA2M called “At Times Embellished”.

Carlos Copertone studied Law and obtained a PhD on the ways cities grow. In his teaching practice he literally proposed taking to the streets to explore and rethink them. All these approaches have gradually taken him closer to the field of architecture and contemporary art. He has curated various exhibitions and has also published books and is closely involved with Caniche, a publishing production and action platform outside conventional exhibition circuits that came into being in 2015.

The idea behind the Image Symposium is to provide a space for collective thinking on the theory, practice, semantic openings and contemporary demarcations of visual cultures, taking the form of a forum for debate, a symposium and workshops, and an open call for research projects.

The point of departure for this edition of the symposium is the work of a research group at MCA2M which has sourced in Manel Clot’s texts a multitude of incipient ideas, obsessive desires, textured references, serious nostalgia, untimely utopias and sudden fatigues that underpinned the brevity and transience of his sentences and dominated his thinking almost permanently. Rather than anachronisms, his discursive output has left us reminiscences of the 1990s: one worth underscoring is the connections between the concept of club culture and art practice; another is the invention and implementation of appreciative and operative categories, where none previously existed, for the consideration of new expressive repertoires and new meaningful registers that would become symptomatic of a time and a place.

This symposium is curated by Jesús Alcaide, Néstor García and Víctor Aguado. The title is borrowed from Musée des phrases, 2003-2015, by Manel Clot. The image (High Culture, 1996) is by Carles Congost, produced for an exhibition at Transmission Gallery and taken in Manel Clot’s studio with the assistance of Daniel Riera. The image shows a young Fine Art student called Joan Morey.

CALL

MCA2M announces an open call for the submission of research projects to be presented at the 27th Image Symposium, whose theme is club culture: club culture as the act and practice of expanding the field of given representations of subjectivity, of producing fictions of somatic permanence, fluctuations in desire, possibilities of dissidence towards the social distribution or other relationships between the body and temporality.

The selected projects may be presented in two different formats:

(1) Presentation of papers or performative lectures, with a duration of 30-45 minutes during the afternoon, based on or presenting for the first time a research project related with the theme of the symposium.

(2) Commented listening sessions on a theme of interest for the symposium, with a duration of 45-60 minutes during the morning, either closed or open to the participation of attendants in the construction of meaning.

Projects submitted to the open call should send: application form and project dossier to the following email: recepcion.ca2m@madrid.org. When attaching video or audio files, please follow the specific instructions included in the form. The submission and presentation of the project can be made in English or Spanish. Forms with incomplete information shall not be accepted.

The deadline for presenting projects is 31 March. The curators of this edition of the symposium shall select a maximum of 6 projects, bearing in mind the selection criteria of the relevance of the project to the theme and format of the symposium, as well as its overall coherence within an artistic or research practice.

The names of the selected projects will be announced on 7 April. Although persons selected shall be informed of the exact day and time of the presentation, it is expected that they be available to attend the symposium on all three days: 19, 20 and 21 May.

Selected projects shall receive a fee of €300 for their presentation at the symposium, which shall be subject to obligatory tax deductions. When necessary MCA2M shall also run with the travel and accommodation expenses.

International Seminar  May 20 to 23

May 23 Forum for Researchers and artists 
May 13 to Sept. 27 Exhibition

CA2M organizes the XVI Image Symposium including a conference and debate programme on the subject of Imagine_Historicize.

Within the framework of this programme, an open call is issued inviting participation of researchers and artists. The selected authors will introduce their projects to the public attending, during journeys dedicated to the Forum of the unpublished. Those projects will be published in the book of minutes of the Symposium.

The Image Symposium intended to be a place of discussion and reflection around issues relevant to the setting of the contemporary subject.

Within this frame, history and memory currently have a strength and visibility that goes beyond the academic sphere which constitute a social and cultural hot debate. The official History, single and linear, has been broken into parts to give rise to multiple memories, demands as a mean of identity and, also, as a set of political and cultural values.

Such proliferation of histories, sometimes incompatible, is the result of complex dynamics and societies ever more diverse that consider the past time through memories, remains and monuments as an archeological process ever open. For its part, the global cultures of the images produce a time and space in a continue present, where cohabit all geographies, discourses, disciplines, visual styles and historic periods. All of them, floating and available to reinvent pasts, presents and futures.

With all this, what is the capacity and ethic and political role of the production, retrieval (and destruction and occultation) of images in the construction of history and memory? How do historians use images and how do they face the digital era? How “other histories” transform the hegemonic history written by the modern states with cohesion desire? What visions of the present lie behind the images used by artists? What idea of the future? Those are some of the questions raised in the following journeys by means of lectures, debates from great specialists and a “CA2M Abierto” Forum, for researchers and artists.

CALL

CA2M organizes the XVI Image Symposium  including a conference and debate programme on the subject of Imagine_Historicize. Within the framework of this programme, an open call is issued inviting participation of researchers and artists. The selected authors will introduce their projects to the public attending during the journeys of the Forum of the unpublished. Those projects will be published in the book of minutes of the Symposium.

The Call aims to start a forum for debate to projects related to the questions raised before and also to other topics:

- Historians and images. Images: documents of historical evidence or problematic evidence in an irretrievable past?

- Images of memory. Impact of production and destruction of images in the process of constitution of history and memory.

- Other histories. New voices of history through images: imaginary stories.

Requirements: The proposals must include the registration form dully filled in.

- Project on Artistic Theory and Practice. It must be an unpublished project and must  have the DIN A4 size; in case of an artistic practice, it should have the presentation of a memory, dossier or portfolio. The investigation essays will have a range between 10 and 15 pages, doble space and Times New Roman 12. Images screening are permitted during lectures.

Projects, both in Spanish and English, are accepted

Uncompleted applications won´t  be accepted.

The selected authors who wish to attend the Symposium and reside outside the Region of Madrid may benefit from 150 € as travel expenses (the applicant may enclose in its application any relevant document supporting the proof of place of  residence  - eg. Resident permit, City Certificate of Registration, a photocopy of student card, electricity or gas bills...).

The documentation from non-selected projects could be collected during the days of the Symposium.

DOCUMENTATION REQUIREMENTS AND REGISTRATION PERIOD

The deadline for receipt of projects is April 15, 2009. Participant may submit the aforesaid documentation:

- By email: download form at  www.ca2m.org  and send, duly filled in, together with project (in a .doc or .pdf format) to actividades.ca2m@madrid.org. This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

- By mail, enclosing the duly filled in registration form together with the printed project (projects arrived later than April 15 will be discarded)

SELECTION

The directors of the Symposium will select a maximum of 10 projects. April 30 it will be published the list of selected participants in the CA2M web page. The selected participants will receive an express communication, which will state the date and time of his/her presentation at CA2M.

For further information  actividades.ca2m@madrid.org. This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it   or at 91 276 02 27

It will be positively consider those applications that show rigor, creativity, interdisciplinary and   relevancy to the line of work detailed in the call. It won´t be taken into account  the order of registration nor the fact of having participated before in previous editions.

SCHEDULE

MAY 20

11,00 h. Opening  Hon. Minister of Culture and Sports , Mr. Santiago Fisas Ayxelà.
Presentation Ilma. Director General of Archives, Museums and Libraries, Dña. Isabel Rosell Volart.
Presentation Director of Centro de Arte 2 de Mayo, Ferran Barenblit.

11,15 h. Introduction to the Symposium. Mónica Portillo and Sergio Rubira, Directors of the XVI Image Symposium of the Region of Madrid.

12,00 h. Philippe-Alain Michaud. Art historian and curator of film at the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris.

16,00 h. Svetlana Boym. Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature and Associate Professor at the School of Architecture and Design, Harvard University.

18,00 h. The Otolith Group: Anjalika Sagar (artista, comisaria y escritora, Londres); Kodwo Eshun (artista, escritor, DJ, profesor del Máster en Cultura Visual del Goldsmiths College, University of London).

JUE 21 MAY

11,00 h. Santu Mofokeng. Photographer, Johannesburg.

16,00 h. Rogelio López Cuenca. Artist, Malaga.

18,00 h. Rogelio López Cuenca (artist, Málaga) and Pedro G. Romero (artist, Seville).

MAY 22

11,00 h. Nuria Enguita Mayo. Cultural worker, member of the management team arteypensamiento (Universidad Internacional de Andalucía).

13,00 h. Basilio Martín Patino (Film Director, Madrid) and Aurora Fernández Polanco (Professor of History and Theory of Contemporary Art, Universidad Complutense de Madrid)

16,00 h. Eyal Sivan. Documentary filmmaker, London.

18,00 h. Francesc Torres (artist, Barcelona) and Fernando Sánchez Castillo (artist, Madrid).

MAY 23

11,00 h. CA2M Abierto: Forum for researchers and artists.

17,00 h. Screening of The Specialist, documentary film by Eyal Sivan and Rony Brauman, 1999, 128 minutes, OV subt. Spanish. (1999: Official Selection Berlinale, Berlin, best documentary of the year, Guild of Media Authors (SCAM); best documentary of the year, Adolf Grimme Prize, Germany).

19,15 h. Closing Day

The Museum will provide simultaneous interpreting for the lectures to be conducted in English or French.

Free registration at   centrodeartedosdemayo@madrid.org or by phone at 91 276 02 27 as of April 15, 2009

BRIEF BIOGRAPHY OF THE LECTURERS

Svetlana Boym is a writer, theorist and artist, Professor of Slavic and comparative literature, associate professor in the School of Architecture and Design, Harvard University. Author of The Architecture of the Off-Modern (2008), Territories of Terror: Memory and Mythology of the Gulag in Contemporary Russian-American Art (exhibition catalog, 2007) and The Future of Nostalgia (2001).

www.svetlanaboym.com

Nuria Enguita Mayo has been responsible of projects  at Fundació Antoni Tapies, Barcelona (1998-2008). She was part of the curatorial team of Manifesta 4 (Frankfurt, 2002). He has worked on numerous projects such as Tour-ismos. La derrota de la disensión (2004) o Culturas de Archivo (2000)  and she is a member of the management team of art and thought (Universidad Internacional de Andalucía).

Aurora Fernández Polanco is Professor of History and Theory of Contemporary Art, UCM. Her publications include "Shoah y el debate Lanzman (Moses) / Godard (San Pablo)" in Er (2004), " Historia, montaje e imaginación: sobre imágenes y visibilidades," in Imágenes de la violencia en el arte contemporáneo (2005). Artistic advisor and editor of the exhibition catalog Basilio Martin Patino: Espejos en la niebla -Mirror in the Mist (2008).

Rogelio López Cuenca is an artista who works with contemporary audiovisual material, historical archives and history of art, among others. His work examines the processes of ideological production of identities and histories. Among his projects include: Gitanos de papel (2009); Málaga 1937 (2007), o El Paraíso es de los extraños (2001). He participated in the Johannesburg Biennale, Manifesta 1 (Rotterdam), São Paulo, Lima and Istanbul.

www.malagana.com

Basilio Martín Patino has led Nueve cartas a Berta (1965) or, in hiding, Queridísimos verdugos (1973) and Caudillo (1974). Awarded on numerous occasions, he has presented retrospectives in Bremen, Hamburg, Rome and at  MoMA in New York (2007). In 2008, Madrid held his solo exhibition Espejos en la niebla

www.basiliomartinpatino.com

Philippe-Alain Michaud is an art historian and curator of the film collection of the Musée d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Author of Sketches: histoire de l'art, cinéma (2006) and Aby Warburg et l'image en mouvement (1998). Curator of Le mouvement des images (Centre Pompidou, 2006-2007) and Comme Le Reve Le dessin (Louvre / Centre Pompidou, 2002).

Santu Mofokeng is a photographer and writer. His work is an investigation into the construction of social identity and history, landscape and memory, especially in the context of the history of South Africa and Apartheid. He has exhibited recently at Rivington Place, London (2009), Iziko-South African National Gallery, Cape Town (2007), Venice Biennale (2007) and Africa Remix (2006-2008). He has participated in Documenta 11, Kassel (2002).

The Otolith Group is composed by Anjalik Sagar-artist, writer and curator, and Kodwo Eshun, writer, artist, DJ and curator, professor of the Master in Visual Culture at Goldsmiths College, London. Their  recent projects include: the performance Communists Like Us, and A Long Time Between Suns, two-part exhibition of the films by Otolith, visual essays narrated from investigating the future, past, present and the future itself, mixing fiction, personal files and documentaries, both in London in 2009.

Pedro G. Romero is an artist, editor and researcher, working primarily on two projects: Archivo FX, an extensive file of visual material on the anti-sacramental iconoclasm in Spain between 1845 and 1945, and Máquina P.H., a series of projects on flamenco. He is member of the arteypensamiento team at the International University of Andalusia, where he has coordinated SI, Sevilla Imaginada.

www.fxysudoble.org

Fernando Sánchez Castillo is an artist. His work moves and subverts symbols of power deployed in public spaces. Among his recent exhibitions include: Divertimento, Galería Juana de Aizpuru, Madrid (2009), The Unresolved ... Vleeshal, Holland (2008), 7 +1, MARCO Vigo (2008), and Abajo la inteligencia, MUSAC, Leon (2007). He participated in the Havana Biennial, Bucharest, Istanbul and Sao Paulo.

Eyal Sivan is a documentary filmmaker, producer, essayist and professor of production in the School of Social Sciences and Cultural Studies (East London University). Among his award-winning films stand out: Itsembatsemba, Rwanda one genocide later (2004), Route 181, Fragments of a Journey in Palestine-Israel (2003) and The Specialist (1999), fiction based on file of the trial of Adolf Eichmann and inspired in Eichmann in Jerusalem Hannah Arendt.

Francesc Torres, artist, curator and writer. His work invites a constant reflection on the mechanisms of power, memory, ideology and violence. His work has been exhibited, among others, in: IVAM, Valencia, Bilbao Guggenheim, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona: Whitney Museum and MoMA in New York, MNCARS, Madrid, or MACBA, Barcelona, where he conducted a retrospective in 2008, Da Capo.

DIRECTED BY

Mónica Portillo is curator and art critic. From 2002 to 2007 he was director of the department of education and public programs at Mudam Luxembourg. Editor of Le petit Jean de la Ciotat de l'art contemporain (2007), Lamento (2007) and Mark Lewis. Arrêt sur ​​images (2006).

Sergio Rubira is curator and art critic. Associate Professor of History of Contemporary Art, UCM, Madrid. He is part of the cultural production agency RMS La Asociación. He has been deputy director of EXIT publications between 2006 and 2009 and is currently external editor of the photography magazine EXIT.

The evening we read Delicious Monster, a short story by the Jamaican-born Canadian writer Nalo Hopkinson, we asked the question what does a monster know and what does a monster taste like, and what does it mean to read from knowledge or from taste. We will talk about monsters, birds, demigods, humans, non-humans and plants, like monstera deliciosa which is also known as fruit salad plant, Swiss cheese plant, monster fruit, and balazo, while the Spanish name costilla de Adán compares it with the ribs of Adam. After the session we agreed to exchange cuttings, so that everybody would look after somebody else’s plant at home. This gave rise to gardens and stories. Shortly afterwards we agreed to continue the reading group and fiction. Almost as if we were always dealing with a new cutting, each reading group at CA2M has led to a new experience: from Know Who You’re Dealing With (2014 ̶ 2015) to The Body as Archive (2015 ̶ 2016) and from there to Vaster that Empires and More Slow (2017).

Delicious Monster proposes conversations and readings within the confines of science fiction, terror and fantasy short stories that rethink some of the guises taken by the “monster”, especially those related with women: mermaids, medusas, witches, bearded women, cripples, outcasts... will be the focal point of sessions to think about horror as a landscape of the limits of the known world and to address the monster as a place from which to generate the surprise of the unexpected; to question what does monstrous or horrific mean; to challenge the order that regulates what is natural, normal or strange; to invent other ways of understanding each other. And we will do so through narrations from, among other, Mario Bellatin, Maryse Condé, Edwidge Danticat, Nalo Hopkinson, Ena Lucía Portela, Jean Rhys, Mary Shelley and Samanta Schweblin. Delicious Monster is also an invitation to experiment sensorial and collective ways of reading.

The group is moderated by Tamara Díaz Bringas.

To partake in any session members of the group must have read the texts in advance and attend with a participative attitude.

Enrolment free from 19 September at biblioteca.ca2m@madrid.org

In 2018 we are introducing a publishing project in conjunction with the printers ROMA. Together we wish to think about some of the practices proposed by the art centre’s Department of Education and Activities and to then share them in printed format.

Agua de Borrajas is a Spanish expression meaning something like “it came to nothing” and is used to speak about something that is left over and hard to capitalise. Borraja is the Spanish for borage, an uncommon annual herb that people do not often know about or recognise, and which people do not pick when it grows in public spaces, which means that it keeps growing and can be gathered by anyone who knows and values it. To prepare it for eating you have to carefully remove the fine fluff that covers the leaves and stalks. Borage is a sturdy plant yet highly perishable and has beautiful blue flowers.

Each one of the processes will have its own particular formal characteristics and will have a bearing on, among other things, the means of production of the printing, suggestions for each project, and what receives the best response.

Enrolment at biblioteca.ca2m@madrid.org  

The only requirement to take part is to have read the books before each session, and to attend with a participative disposition. The group will be moderated by Tamara Díaz Bringas

You’re looking at a clock. It has hands, and figures arranged in a circle. The hands move. You can’t tell if they move at the same rate, or if one moves faster than the other. What does 'than' mean?

The crew of the ship Gum –a nickname meaning something like “pet”– is sent to outer space to gather information on unexplored worlds. One of the scientists on board has a special gift, a talent for "wide-range bioempathic receptivity", which allows him to pick up emotions and perceptions from his surroundings. When the group lands on a distant planet on which there seems to be no life forms, they are faced with unexpected events and mysteries in which empathy proves critical. Vaster Than Empires and More Slow by Ursula K. Le Guin will be the starting point for the reading group which will now focus on science fiction.

To give ourselves time, to take time on fiction stories that participants in previous reading groups wanted to share. The first group came together at the end of 2014 with an invitation to Saber con quién se trata (Know Who You are Dealing With) from Bulegoa zenbaki barik, the art and knowledge office located in Bilbao, which proposed a programme of readings on different agreements, contracts and relationships that define our everyday life. The participants in the opening experience played with and transformed the initial programme, and between 2015 and 2016 we opened up a new phase that expanded our desire for collective reading and experimentation. The second group, called El cuerpo como archivo (The Body as Archive) asked itself, among other questions, about the body as a political and cultural archive and technologies –legal, medical, architectural, media– for the production of the body, gender, sexuality.

Although a large part of our reading is based on essays, science fiction has also crossed our paths on numerous occasions. For instance, Albert Meister’s La soi-distant utopie du Centre Beaubourg (1977) argued: "the only way to reject the system is to ignore it, to deny it. Not against it, but beside it, creating a parallel universe, the parallel space-time continuum of science fiction". Or the inspiring political and multi-species history fictions of Donna Haraway that, as she herself as said, have their stem cells in the creators of science fiction.  

In this third season of the reading group scheduled over ten evenings between February and June 2017, we will take our starting point in stories by Ursula K. Le Guin and Octavia Butler, as well as Ted Chiang, Clarice Lispector and Macedonio Fernández. Similarly to previous occasions, our meetings will ultimately be shaped by the affinities and derivations of the group. Without any given destination, we instead propose to collectively gift ourselves the stores we deserve, the time we deserve and perhaps along the way we can also gift ourselves tools for the worlds we wish to inhabit. We might spend three to five sessions on one single story or we could read a different one for each session. In any case, we will strive to stroll leisurely towards the unexpected. And more slow.