Picnic Sessions

The first time I entered the hills, Godmother asked me to put my hands on the ground and then bring them to my mouth and kiss them. She told me to go around the kapok tree three times, the guardian of the hills’ eye where she buried her staff, and to look up waiting for signs of permission. As I was looking at the sky, a few drops fell on my face to the beat of a flutter of birds dancing with the prayer that Godmother was whispering, embracing the roots of the mystery.

yenyere guma good evening, good evening

yenyere guma, good evening, how are you?

In this edition of the Picnic Sessions 2024, we’re going to put our hands on the earth, ask for permission, head back to the bush. We’re going to connect with the Ashe, with gestures, myths, rites, wisdom, listening. We’re going to dance resistances and fleetingness, celebrate the differences of this living hill-Caribbean-archive. On the museum’s terrace between 30 May and 4 July, we are going to activate a ceremony in six stages (Rupture, Prayer, Supplication, Trance, Manifestation, Coronation) to break away from ethnographic lenses that burden our bodies, territories, geographies, spiritualities and creations with exoticising, simplifying tales. We’re going to bless ourselves with the Caribbean pica-pica before crossing the sea with the permission of the dead women who replenish it with tears every day, with the license of the blood, chains and Orishas that live there.

We’re going to paint the body with soil and salt; mark each step in the sand while the echoes of the calling drum resonate in the thickness. Check each leaf and each stone as part of the legacy that sustains and narrates us. Look at the sky and talk with the clouds, with the stars, with the sun and the moon, who guide our walking and our singing. Feel the wind that carries our ancestors’ secrets, that whispers stories of freedom and forgotten struggles. Each step in the hills is an act or recovery, an act of memory that challenges the imposed oblivion, that unearths the truths concealed under the weight of history written by others.

Godmother said that there was a tunnel under the tallest caguairán tree on the mountain, which led her directly home whenever she wanted to embrace her Nigerian great-grandmother. Godmother believed in witches and shapeshifters, in güijes —local mythical creatures— and in the two-headed boa that predicted the future on Saint John’s Eve. Godmother flew on a traditional twig broom and was familiar with all the good and bad herbs for remedies. Godmother listened to the owls, the moon and the foolish snakes in the mangrove swamp from her swinging rope over the coloured earth. Every Friday she blessed and cleansed with basil, verbena and red flowers. At some point in the ceremony, she fell into a trance and her body was occupied by the old Sarabanda, who always came singing:

I went to the hills and brought back

something nice for you

something nice for you

something nice for you

José Ramón Hernández (Palma Soriano 1988)

He is a non-disciplinary Afro-Cuban artist who graduated from the Instituto Superior de Arte of Cuba. He is the founder and artistic director of Osikán – Creation Incubator and the Afronteriza Residency of the Centro Cultural Espacio Afro in Madrid. His practice ranges between artistic direction, dramaturgy, choreography, curation, installation, performance, education, mediation and cultural management. He is a spiritualist, babalocha and palero.

His creative investigation focuses on Afro-descendant rituals, performativities, peripheral bodies, materials, spiritualities, memories, migrations, cartographies and desires. He tests the boundaries between fiction and reality, work with non-fictional documents and the tools of the senses to affect and intervene in social and community processes.

He won the Circuito de las Artes Plásticas Award of the Community of Madrid in 2022 with the installation Ojú inú yàrá, the Villanueva Critics’ Award (Unión Nacional de Artistas de Cuba, UNEAC, and International Association of Theatre Critics) and the Aire Frio Award (Asociación de jóvenes escritores y artistas de Cuba) for the 2016 work BaqueStriBois; and first prize at the 2006 La Fiesta de las Relaciones for the work Maferefún pa Antonia.

His works have been shown in Cuba, Mexico, Chile, the Dominican Republic, Canada, Germany, Belgium, the United States, Brazil and Spain.

Interdependence is at the very groundbase of our most everyday reality. Marina Garcés contends that “you cannot say I without an echo of us”, but it is a singular us—not ‘all of us’ but rather ‘each one of us’. We are increasingly bombarded by the fantasy that it is possible to live in isolation, but, not only that, that this life in isolation is livable. Political discourses, economic dynamics, ways of life, routines, slogans and individualist aspirations hold sway. And even though the lesson that we need each other can be gleaned from the extreme circumstances we have lived through and from everyday reality, the dominant narratives are different.

Coexistence has been smothered by survival.

Interdependence, and its manifold expressions, is the common thread running through these picnic sessions: ranging from our relationship with nature to work relations. The role of the public is crucial to reach the level of euphoria needed to generate the sensation of community, the sense of belonging that I, you and we all look for in a family, a rave or a union.

Interdependence comes about from the undeniable vulnerability that we all share in common. To bring this reality to light, the hierarchical relationship between audience and artists will disappear in the sessions when creators openly reveal their precariousness, endemic to the cultural industry, exposing the hidden underbelly of their life stories, a kind of in bio veritas that speaks of hand-to-mouth jobs and the difficulty if not directly the impossibility of making a living from art. In addition, the bureaucratic, administrative and fiscal demands required to take part in certain cultural spaces are major obstacles for creative practice. To circumvent and shatter them, mutual support is, as always, the most effective instrument at hand.

More than just participating, the audience becomes one with the music and performances, it is invited to reach out and touch each other blindly, to make exchanges on the sidelines of the economy or to take stock of their privilege with regards those who society categorizes as dependents, as if the rest of us were not.

These Picnic Sessions are an invitation to make the most of these bonds, and to create new ones. With euphoria.

Curated by: Nerea Pérez de las Heras and Mar Rojo.

// At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Picnic Society was founded in London and met regularly in the open air. On its outings, which had no specific host as such, the individual members were expected to provide the refreshments and the entertainment. Starting out from the same concept, and forming its own particular Picnic Society, every year CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo invites various curators to design a programme for the art centre’s roof terrace.

Every Thursday from the end of May until mid-July the CA2M roof terrace will be transformed into a space where we will carry out a programme of activities mixing the body and sound with education and participation. //

PROGRAMME

• Thurs 26/05 I IF YOU MOVE, I MOVE Miss Beige, Dembooty

• Thurs 02/06 I OUTSIDE THE NORM Costa Badía, LVL1

• Thurs 09/06 I INTERDEPENDENTS Ana Matey, Maricas: Jovendelaperla & Berenice

• Thurs 16/06 I A SINGLE BODY Ernesto Artillo, Ece Canli

• Thurs 23/06 I NEW PIECES, NEW GAMES Andrea Jiménez, Caliza

• Thurs 30/06 I MELT, MIX, STIR Victória Bemfica, Emily da Silva, Gabriela Clavería and Ikram Bouloum

SCHEDULE: 9:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. (EXCEPT THE SESSION ON THE 30TH, WHICH WILL BEGIN AT 6:00 p.m.).

YOU CAN DOWNLOAD THE PROGRAM HERE

«After a very long winter, you see a green parrot perched on a blossoming almond tree. You would never have seen this in Madrid not long ago, but now it’s a common sight. We don’t know how we’re going to get back on track, and one thing we’re left with is celebrating a world that’s not going to be exactly the same. There are many things, even more when celebrating is part of the process of leaving behind, and moving forward. That path that is knowing what we follow. A public place, for everyone, green, high up, free, and specific. A place like a picnic.

This programme was shaped around the theme of tradition in an intuitive way, and we say intuitively because it was not actively sought and it was not until everything had been designed that we actually recognised this fact. Tradition understood in an expanded form, placed between the material and immaterial of this moment we are living. And who says when it is and when it is no longer like that? Throughout the sessions we see the most literal translation represented by craftsmanship, by mythology and inherited customs, but we also see that this whole world is reinterpreted, remixed, subverted, and left open to the air of the tensions of today’s world. In this open sky, questions and suggestions appear about what tradition means, to be tradition but also to make and create it. To believe it. Sometimes the folkloric appears, sometimes the ceremonial. Things that we know exist but that we have never seen also appear, which, because they are part of our dreams, also belong to us. At other times, there are interpretations that are so mixed in their languages and influences that they overflow. Yet, at the same time, when overlapped they create an image in which you can recognise yourself in the background. These are very local picnics. In them, there is a continuous reference to what is part of us and what we cannot be detached from. This happens and is interspersed, and suddenly it brings us to common ground where we can be together. And there is, in all this, a moment of self-reference of what the actual tradition of the picnic is and the place that is this terrace. We want to transfer these two things to other places, to other formats and, in short, to be able to live in the different ways we have always appreciated. A terrace can also be a forest.

We have skipped a spring. This is what we thought before everything happened, now we don’t want to wear shoes. We’re telling you this because it’s true. All that remains is for us to invite you to look together with us at what is coming from what has already passed.

Curated by:

Maral Kekejian and bwelke (Juanito Jones, Lorenzo García-Andrade and María Buey)»

PROGRAM

• T 27/05 | OPENING:  Javi Álvarez y Javi Pérez Iglesias; Maider López; Enrico Dau Yang Wey.
• T 03/06 | DIRECTOS: Ylia; SLVJ; Bazofia.
• T 10/06 | KATA GURUMA : Aitana Cordero y David Cárdenas
• T 17/06 | EN EL AIRE: Jonás de Murias; Kike García + Jesús Bravo; Lara Brown; Eliseo Parra
• T 24/06 | NOCTURNO: Bosque R.E.A.L y Cuqui Jerez
• T 01/07 | 1th OF JULY: Orquesta; JASSS.

NOTA SOBRE EL ACCESO

• Recuerda que el aforo es limitado, por lo que cuando realices tu inscripción, te enviaremos un email confirmándote que tienes entrada.  Una vez lo recibas, podrás pasar a recoger tu entrada en la recepción del Museo el día de la sesión de Picnic hasta las 21.15h.  Si a esa hora no la has recogido, se pondrá a disposición del público.
• Si no puedes venir por alguna razón, por favor avísanos cuanto antes para que alguien de la lista de espera pueda ocupar tu plaza.
• Este evento respeta las medidas seguridad y las restricciones de aforo indicadas por las autoridades sanitarias, por lo que el público estará sentado y con la distancia de seguridad apropiada.
• Cuando vengas, por favor sigue todas las indicaciones del personal de la organización para que tanto el acceso como el desalojo se haga siguiendo las normas de seguridad.
• Por tu bien y el de todos, si tienes síntomas compatibles con el Covid-19, no acudas al Centro.