Education

Last year, with the help of Costa Badía and Julia Ayerbe, we thought long and hard about the entrance door of the CA2M Museum.  About how it could and could not be opened, about the implicit rules behind that, about the illusion of architectural neutrality and on how discourses on inclusive education are almost always empowering and celebratory. That door is now accessible, and we want to think slowly, without taking anything for granted, about what inclusion really means in a museum, in the history of these practices and whether it is still possible to broaden their imaginary.  

This course will focus on the concept of easy reading, i.e. a method that brings together a set of guidelines and recommendations regarding the drafting of texts, the design and layout of documents and the validation of their comprehensibility, aimed at making information accessible to people with reading comprehension difficulties. 

Far from taking for granted their meaning-translating intention, for example of works of art, we wish to make both the information we provide and the mediator’s role more complex. We will think about these norms and highlight what lies behind the eloquent, closed discourses of some bodies over others. Together, we will open up new ways of understanding and simultaneously standing up for what is not understood. 

In recent years, the department has been working together with the educational community at Federico García Lorca CEIP. This experience has allowed us to rethink the ways in which relationships are established between the school and the museum. We are aware of the importance of creating a working group to develop innovative practices related to demanding, committed and long-lasting art education.

This school year, we will continue to investigate together through the Artist at Work Here programme, in which artists carry out a project in collaboration with the school community: teachers, pupils and families.

Given the phasing out of art education in formal education, it seems essential to us to continue to carry out these projects in educational institutions as tools with which to confront the prevailing attitudes. One of the basic aims of this project is to reflect on the power of the long-term projects carried out by artists to affect us. In this sense, we are interested in investigating how artists can affect the educational institution and, conversely, how educational institutions, state schools in particular, can give back to artists and the very education department in terms of experience.

This year, Belén Rodríguez will be the artist invited to carry out a project with the pupils of Federico García Lorca CEIP in Móstoles.

Last year, together with the boys and girls who reside at the Móstoles Children’s Home, fantasised about making a home inside our own tree house. We imagined what its shape would be like, what we would do inside it and what would happen around it.  

Some time later, in a conversation with the teachers at the Pablo Neruda UFIL, we saw the importance of learning by doing, and we assessed the need to turn educational spaces into places where real-life projects can be put into practice. We then thought it would be exciting to involve the Carpentry Department at the college in the construction of the house imagined by that group of children. 

We at the education department like to think that we can all take part in the construction of the world around us, so in January we will begin a process of collaboration with both groups to conceive, design and make this powerful image possible. 

For this purpose, we invited the designer Curro Claret to activate and guide us through this process. A long-distance dialogue that aims to rethink the idea of home and expand the concept of home and family. This creative process will be completed in early summer with the installation of the little house in the garden of the children’s home. 

Curro Claret. As a designer, Curro Claret’s interest lies in how people can participate in defining and building their environment by making use of their circumstances in a balanced and respectful way. His work often involves connecting a particular project with different groups of people. 

First of all, we should explain that besides meaning ‘crazy’ or ‘mad’, the Spanish word loca from the title of this workshop “Volvernos Loca” is also used to describe “effeminate” homosexual men and is roughly equivalent to the English terms ‘sissy’ or ‘flaming queen’.

Sometimes when we are really interested or enthusiastic about something we say that we are “mad” to do it. This “going mad” is also a queer space where we stop being who we were and do what we have never done before.

It takes very little to make us go mad: a body, desire, to imagine how, what, when, and also a little bit of listening. To go out onto the streets together and run, run like mad. Go mad at school, in class, in the museum. Mad with joy, with pleasure, with longing to have a good time. Going mad so as not to end up mad.

A two-session workshop using action and performance to think from a queer perspective about ways of being that are beyond binary categories and fixed definitions of identity.

Final cycle of secondary school.

Schedule: the first 2-hour session to be arranged with the school. The second session from 11:00 to 13:30 at CA2M.

Maximum number of students: 30.

In this workshop the groups will work with art’s capacity to transform time and space. Over the course of the various sessions the class will be turned into a room and the museum into a house. The students will turn off the lights, remove the desks and dance. They will visit the most intimate corners of the museum and together they will build a shelter.

Last year, the performing artist Aitana Cordero designed this workshop in which we will discover how hard it is to work with intimacy in secondary schools and, at once, just how important it is to do so.

Times: the first two two-hour sessions at school and the third open-ended session at CA2M to be agreed with the teacher.

Maximum number of students: 30.

There are unused ceramic kilns in the storeroom for the sculpture workshop at the Europa secondary school. When we asked about them we were told that, back in the early 1990s, a group of teachers managed to introduce a Visual Arts course at the school. They spoke nostalgically about when the arts building was built and about the long teachers’ meetings to discuss experimental ideas they would introduce in the classrooms.

It strikes us as incredibly important to try to bring back this passion, especially at a time when art is being pushed out of the curriculum at schools. This year we want to start a project together with José Luis, Mercedes and Carmen (art teachers at the Europa secondary school) so that the students can create their own space for creativity. A place where they can turn on the kilns once again, increase the number of hours in creating, and defend the importance of art.
 

PHASE ONE: collaboration project between the CA2M library, Education department and IES Europa secondary school

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

This school year, along with Sonia and Andrea, the librarians at CA2M, we will begin a collaborative project to create an archive of art publications with art students at IES Europa secondary school: a strange, unsuspected library created from holdings discarded from the CA2M library. Students will take discarded books, catalogues and fanzines on a journey to the art classes at IES Europa. Once they find themselves in their new emplacement, we will start to think about and construct a collective archive where we will bring into question the conventional logic of a library in order to create a new archive narrative from materials which were initially rejected and which therefore are situated, from the outset, against the grain. 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.The first activity will be a three-day workshop to create furniture in which we will jointly design and build an artefact or piece of furniture that will serve as both transport container and display case for the publications.

PHASE TWO: publishing with nothing

During the recent confinement we wanted to continue developing this project, even at a distance. For that purpose, we invited Andrea Galaxina to come up with a proposal to send to students. Taking the form of a tutorial, Andrea prepared a fanzine to explore the creative possibilities of self-publishing.

“In these strange times we are going through, when you cannot leave home to buy things, or perhaps you cannot leave home at all, it is important to realize that the materials we have at hand can open doors to fascinating worlds that perhaps, during our everyday lives, we don’t pay any real attention to. To create with nothing is a political and transformative action. And so too is publishing with nothing. The most subversive way of publishing in history is the fanzine. Furthermore, publishing fanzines allows us to expand our creativity. But we can also turn it into a vehicle to connect with others. Now that our interpersonal relationships have been seriously affected, we can take advantage of this state of emergency to introduce new ways of expressing ourselves and communicating with one another. That’s why in this guide I am going to show you how to make a fanzine with things that you probably have ready access to during confinement: ordinary everyday stationary materials with which we can nonetheless do extraordinary things. I will also give you a brief recap of the history and philosophy behind it and how to distribute our creations without leaving home".

Read Editar con nada. Una pequeña guía práctica (y un poco teórica) para hacer fanzines.