Thinking

The Autoplacer Working Group emerged in order to analyse how the current COVID-19 health crisis has affected the independent music sector. So, four days were set aside during the month of November in which different agents (labels, musicians, independent groups, promoters, programmers, self-producers, etc.) related to the Autoplacer festival and its different fields, delved into the current situation with the idea of proposing transversal improvements that could be applied both to live music, as well as to other independent self-production processes.

The Autoplacer working groups were held on 20, 23, 24 and 25 November from 11 AM to 5 PM and included the participation of: Collective AC Autoplacer, formed by Manuel Moreno, Adolfo Párraga and Roberto Salas; Mar Rojo, Dani Cantó, Andrea Galaxina, Patrizia di Filippo, Alberto G. Pulido, Eduardo García Gil (Giradiscos), Elisa Pérez Caliza, María Eguizabal, Sara Brito (Chicotrópico), José Salas, Sonsoles Rodríguez, Marcos García (Ayuken), Francisco Meneses, Tommaso Marzocchini, Natalia Piñuel, Gonzalo Sanz and Estrella Serrano Tovar.

As a result of this joint analysis, the Autoplacer collective published a complete report – following a diagnosis and a subsequent exhaustive list of conclusions – that addressed the different problems faced by the most independent musical activity with regard to policies, resources, formats, etc. There is also a short essay on the definition of submerged music that defends its inclusion in cultural institutions. The 67-page document features the illustrations created by Daniel Puiggròs for the Autoplacer 2020 festival, photographs of the working groups and all attendee profiles. 

CA2M hostes The Image Symposium  of  Comunidad de Madrid since its XVI edition. Ever since then, it is composed of an open call for art theory and practice investigation projects, a forum for researchers, an international seminar and two artist´s workshop which bring to reflection and debate about some questions concerning  today´s artistic practice.

You can check previous programmes of last editions celebrated in CA2M, as well as, the videos of the Symposium.

Even if we wanted to, we cannot kill our dead. The dead have summoned us to undertake certain tasks, and so we carry them around with us in our lives every day, in little gestures and flashes of very intense sensations. How can we share these losses, the part of them that has stuck to us, their strange temporalities, the hankering to bury our heart, the pain of Blue — the uncertain stumbling Buzz —? I wanted to build a boat, and take it down river, to sail its waters and once again bind me to the branches and birds that bring back so many memories. Some people want to light a fire, or perhaps burn the piles of straw and wood gathered by so many hands one late summer’s evening. There are people who sew fruit peel, stitching those dry skins to conjure friends that had to leave us, very soon and very far away.

There are no words, our bedraggled eyes no longer see, perhaps only some gestures can be both offering and memorial... As if together we watched over a bonfire to keep alive through our bodies and stories someone who, though no longer with us, will always be there. And because we are forced to look the other way, not to believe, to fall ill, then giving ourselves our own rituals is the basic task of the living. Because death in the end is only for us, those who remain behind, those who are brave enough to provide room for a love that is eternal and that only transforms. Mourning is a political task, it builds community, it is a practice of care that reproduces life. In mourning we are together, the feeling of isolation is only the symptom of a society drowning in silence. I speak with my friends about this, that I believe that our grandmothers were the last to live with a sensibility that understood death as a part of life, that they knew how to meet again on earth, that now perhaps it was our task to create other rituals, other ways of being, of living and of dying. Sometimes we don’t know how, nor even understand why, it is just a flash, an intuition, a desire. Maybe it is only a question of listening, and of a deep love. And in that we are never alone.

Principal researcher: Marta Echaves

 * Title inspired by Emily Dickinson’s poem 465 to death.

One can recognize in the texts by Manel Clot (Granollers, 1956-2016) a multiplicity of incipient ideas, obsessive desires, rough references, the validity of nostalgia, inopportune utopias and sudden fatigues that traverse the fleetingness of the sentence and dominate his thinking almost permanently. They are not anachronisms but rather reminiscences of the 1990s, of its darkness and sweetness; a discursive production that implemented the concept of club culture and the language of night life in relation with contemporary art practices.

One cold night the body explains that everything is balanced, except the little losses of heat registered during every exchange of information. What remains, in fact, are those drops of sweat that the body misses. The pores sweat, exude a kind of self-conscious tenderness.

What Can I Do with the Rest of My Body is a research group whose members are Víctor Aguado Machuca, Jesús Alcaide and Néstor García Díaz. The title is taken from Musée des phrases, 2003-2015 by Manel Clot.

The need to ask ourselves about the possibilities for engaging today with the live arts has encouraged SUSANA to pose questions from where we observe, reflect on and implement the reality in which we inhabit.

How do we create an axis that structures this reality in order to address it? An axis that at once serves as a new field of work expanded for the future, beyond the specificity of the new and changing moment we are living through and which, furthermore, engages with experiences from artists, past and present, that help us to reflect and learn from them. To this end, and acknowledging our impulse, we have realized that in order to start building we need to begin at the beginning: oneself.

SUSANA is a research group whose members are Juanito Jones, María Buey, Maral Kekejian and Lorenzo García-Andrade.

We are going to do things that last, that take time and that need time. We will make sure that whatever it is that is coming down the line will find us with our hands busy. This year we want to actually make the paper on which next year’s education notebook will be printed, so that we are engaged in the present and with what comes later. And also to pick up again what we have not been doing or doing just a bit, looking at how the plants in the roof terrace change and make an almanac of all those cycles, return to the Europa secondary school and its art workshops. To resume and to do again.

Agua de Borrajas is a joint publishing project run by CA2M’s education department and the Roma printers.

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