Actividad

The book 1502 Persons Facing the Wall is the outcome of the research and work undertaken around the Santiago Sierra exhibition being held at the CA2M museum until 2 February 2025. This publication brings together images of Sierra’s characteristic ‘inverse’ portraits and finds resonance in the profound, insightful texts by Alexis Callado, Rosa Martínez, Georg Imdahl, Juan Albarrán, José Luis Corazón, Pilar Villela and Gonzalo Abaha. The book immerses us in a striking picture of the artist and the questions he asks about power and its effects. The publication not only documents the exhibition but also becomes a tool of reflection on the networks shaping our realities.

The activity will feature Carlos TMori (designer), Juan Albarrán (author of one of the texts), Sandra Guimaraes (director of the Helga de Alvear Museum), Alexis Callado (exhibition curator) and Tania Pardo (director of the CA2M Museum).

The ‘Variation 90’ sound activity, directed by Ugo Martínez Lázaro, will be held after the launch. In this piece, the artist aims to manifest and allegorically question forms of social domination and alienation by evoking purification rituals that combine creativity and community resistance. Four experimental musicians take part acoustically in the space for forty minutes to explore the conceptual tensions in Sierra’s work. This collective event will feature Ugo Martínez, Arianna Cana Mackenzie, Doris Steinbichler and Narcoléptica.

Carlos TMori is a graphic designer of publications, visual artist, contemporary art curator and associate professor in the Bachelor’s in Fine Arts at the University of Salamanca. He has a PhD in Fine Arts and two bachelor’s degrees in Fine Arts and Audiovisual Communication. As a graphic designer, he has worked for companies like una más una and La Fábrica and for cultural institutions like the Ministry of Culture, the Foreign Ministry, the DA2 Art Centre, the Conde Duque Contemporary Culture Centre and the MUSAC and Es Baluard museums.

Juan Albarrán is a professor in the Department of Art History and Theory at the Autonomous University of Madrid. His lines of research revolve around contemporary artistic practices and discourses, especially the relationships between art and politics in Spain since the transition to democracy, theories of photography and performance, and representations of torture in contemporary visual culture. He has published the books Disputas sobre lo contemporáneo. Arte español entre el antifranquismo y la postmodernidad (2019) and Performance y arte contemporáneo. Discursos, prácticas, problemas (2019) on these issues, and he has edited the collectively-written volumes Arte y transición (2012 and 2018), Llámalo Performance: historia, disciplina y recepción (with Iñaki Estella, 2015) and Ensayo/Error. Tentativas interartísticas en el Estado español (with Rosa Benéitez, 2018).

Alexis Callado has a degree in Art History from the University of Havana. His curatorial practice includes solo exhibitions with Carlos Pazos (La Casa Encendida, Madrid; Centro de Desarrollo de las Artes Visuales, Havana), as well as group exhibitions (Ante nuestros ojos, Loop Festival, Barcelona; Culto Digestivo, Conarte, Monterey) and collaborative projects like Lab Latino, Eighteenth Arte Paiz Biennial, Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. He is an active promoter of exchanges between the Spanish and Latin American art scenes. He helped to choose, coordinate and produce publishing projects in graphic art, photography and sculptural objects for the company Arte y Naturaleza of Madrid. He has organised artistic projects in Sweden, Spain, France, Guatemala, Mexico, Argentina, Chile and Cuba. He partners with publications, museums, associations and centres specialised in contemporary art. He is a member of the Transatlantic Network and is a co-founder of The Curatorial Bureau.

Tania Pardo is the director of the Museo Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo of the Community of Madrid. She was the Fine Arts advisor of the Community of Madrid until July 2019. Before that, she was in charge of the Exhibition Department at Madrid’s La Casa Encendida. She has also served as a curator at MUSAC, Contemporary Art Museum of Castilla y León, and as the head of programming in the Laboratorio 987 space. She has been the director of projects at the Fundación Santander 2016 (2009–2010) and associate professor of Art History at the Complutense University of Madrid. She has recently curated the Cristina Garrido show The Origin of Forms at the CA2M Museum, and Bird Machine Dream by Teresa Solar Abboud at the same museum along with Claudia Segura in a co-production with MACBA and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin.

Sandra Guimarães (Oporto) is the director of the Helga de Alvear Museum in Cáceres. Her career in the visual arts spans around twenty years and includes posts like the Artistic Director of the Bombas Gens Centre d’Art (Valencia) between 2020 and 2023. Guimarães was the curator of the Serralves Museum (Oporto, Portugal) between 1998 and 2010 and the founding director of programmes at the Remai Modern (Saskatoon, Canada) between 2015 and 2019. At Serralves, she organised exhibitions of contemporary artists like Alvess, Artur Barrio, Thomas Hirschhorn, Cristina Iglesias, Barry Le Va and Dan Graham, among others, and co-curated the exhibition The 80’s. At the Remai Modern, she co-curated the programme prior to the museum’s opening, as well as its inaugural exhibition, Field Guide. Her training includes a master’s in Art History and Archaeology (specialisation in Modern and Contemporary Art) and a master’s in Cultural Management, both from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium).

Ugo Martínez Lázaro merges art and the social sciences with an experimental approach to sound and music. He combines documentary research, texts, music and on-the-ground experiences in projects involving comics, installations and sound art. He co-directs Pirotecnia, a trans-disciplinary improvisation ensemble, which issued an LP with the Madrid Town Hall in 2022, a limited edition of 300 hand-painted records, including a comic he designed, which is available in Madrid and Mexico.

Arianna Cana Mackenzie is a Cuban musician and producer living in Spain. She plays multiple instruments, like the clarinet, the saxophone and the flute. She started studying clarinet at the age of ten in Camagüey and continued at the National Music School and Art College of Havana, where she has also taught. She has worked with the Camagüey Symphony and the ICRT. She conducted the Limpopo Youth Orchestra in South Africa, where she explored Afro-Cuban folklore in Europe, Africa and the Caribbean.

Narcoléptica is the alias of Beatriz Vaca (Seville, 1985), who holds a bachelor’s in Fine Arts and is a self-taught musician. She has been creating experimental electro-acoustic music influenced by psychodelia, ambient music, noise and post-rock since 2006. She processes electric guitar, piano, synthesisers and voice to generate exciting sound experiences. She has issued her own records, contributed to soundtracks and performance pieces and stood out on tours around Europe and Latin America with powerful live presentations.

Doris Steinbichler (Vienna, 1965) is a vocal improvisational artist and creator of transmedia performances in Austria and Mexico. She has won awards in Mexico in performance and radio and has founded projects like ‘Remediar’, ‘Trinchera Ensemble’ and ‘4shrooms’. Her works explore vocal experimentation and multimedia and have been presented at important museums and festivals. In 2023, she celebrated thirty years of her career at Ex Teresa Arte Actual (CdMX), reaffirming her contribution to transdisciplinary art.

Ciudad Sur (‘Southern City’) is a space for shared experimentation launched in 2021 which, taking Móstoles as its starting point, aims to explore the many facets and many riches that generate a sense of belonging in the cities that make up the Madrid’s metropolitan area.   

In this third edition, we will approach Móstoles as post-tourist guides, travelling together through a series of architectures composed of layers of time, experiences and lived moments around what we call free time, based on a proposal of shared experimentation in which this dormitory town will become a holiday destination. 

Leisure, what we call ‘free time’, is one of the things we desire most, a place where we indulge in experiences - lived or projected – which are associated with enjoyment.  

There is a leisure with which we live every day, that which marks the pauses in the flow of daily activity, such as the time we dedicate to sport and its promise of a balanced, healthy, desirable life. But there is also leisure that functions as an escape route, a time and a place where limits are widened: popular festivals, nights out... and of course, the idea of true leisure, and the search for total disconnection: holidays. A long pause that allows us, at least for a while, to pretend to live under another logic, to try to be other people.                                                                                                                

As dormitory towns grew, low-cost ‘getaway’ flights multiplied, definitively linking holidays with the idea of travel. To this end, the tourism industry offers us a myriad of destinations to match our dreams and our wallets, deploying a whole travel imaginary in which this desired ‘freedom’ can take shape. A catalogue of beautiful scenes often constructed in contrast to everyday spaces, based on a play of opposites. From urban grey to the infinite blue skies and seas; from the brick of the city to the white of the Costa Brava, or the warm gold of the sun... But never the ‘brown coast’. This ‘coast’ is Madrid’s metropolitan area, which will be the setting for the activities proposed in this programme, where we will reflect on the evolution of the urban, political and social criteria that have built this city’s landscape of leisure infrastructures. 

The sessions will take place between October 2023 and May 2024: 3rd of October, 7th of November, 12th of December, 16th of  January, 20th of February, 12th of March, 16th of April and 7th of May 2024. 

Coordinated by: Irene de Andrés, La Liminal and Estrella Serrano.

Irene de Andrés was born in one of the world’s most desirable destinations - the island of Ibiza - which has inevitably led her to investigate the evolution of the concept of leisure and the very meaning of travel throughout history, from the first settlers to today’s tour operators. Spas, cruise ships and nightclubs are the key settings for the artist who, through film, sculptural pieces and graphic work, creates journeys through time and through different waters, connecting different historical events that make us reflect on the model of tourist consumption, especially designed for the working class. 

La Liminal is a cultural mediation collective that investigates the city and uses the urban tour as a tool to analyse public space collectively. Our aim is to experiment with the urban landscape in order to propose new readings that focus on those stories that have been made invisible over time, those we have not sufficiently valued, in order to construct alternative discourses that are based on collective learning and that allow for a re-appropriation of the idea of public space as a common good. 

Autoplacer, the music and self-publishing festival held at CA2M for the last thirteen years, is back again in 2022, on Saturday 24 September. Like previous years, the Autoplacer/Sindicalistas collective will bring to Móstoles a selection of groups from the underground Spanish scene in an event which has been defending the inclusion of contemporary forms of music in institutions for over a decade, lending visibility to new sounds and their truly independent processes of publishing, production and diffusion.

This year’s event has scheduled punk veterans Sudor, nouvelle garage melodies from Eterna Joventut, Galician energy with Grande Amore, razor-sharp dream pop from Sofía, old-school pop by La Media Distancia and the techno meets post-punk head-on clash of Alfa Estilo from Valencia. And alongside them, making their debut at Autoplacer are EQX, the winners of the Autoplacer 2021 Rough-Cuts competition, with their brand of disruptive avant-pop.

Autoplacer 2022 has also set aside a section dedicated to electronic music curated by Mosul Mosul in which various DJs and a live set will outline a musical path through afrobeat to witch house, passing through dark techno and trance.

Besides there will also be various invited projects in the field of music and editorial self-publishing.

With concerts by:

SUDOR / ETERNA JOVENTUT / SOFÍA / GRANDE AMORE / ALFA ESTILO / LA MEDIA DISTANCIA / EQX (Winners of Autoplacer 2021 Rough-Cuts)

+ DANCEFLOOR WITH MOSUL MOSUL:

UMBRÍA / GARRITA / GOTHIC SANS / ÜVERDRIVER (Live)

Save the date: 24 September, at Museo CA2M!

Admission free until reaching full capacity.

LABORAL CENTRO DE ARTE Y CREACIÓN INDUSTRIAL AND CA2M CENTRO DE ARTE DOS DE MAYO COPRODUCTION

The exhibition AUTO. road and movies complete the programming of Sueño y materia -dream and material- proposing an approximation to some of the aspects of the film and automobile. The films that compose the cycle, rather than trying to make an overview from the film gender, compose an individual propose of analysis that finds in its complement and global context within the exhibition. If the show reflects on the automobile culture from an art perspective from the latest years, and does it from the consideration of the car as the greatest exponent of a productive and technologic period that already perceive other social and industrial realities. This cycle allows casting a retrospective glace that illustrates complementary aspects of the show..

The cycle is composed by several European and Northamerican productions which a faithful reflexion of the way both continents represent the automobil. In the States, the great and fast adaptability of the film productions easily integrate  automobile as well as unfold  the fast development of a subgender as it is the road movie. The road, search for freedom, escape, speed and persecutions become common elements and codes in many films. On the contrary, the European cinematographic glace is considerable more critic and scentic about automobile and culture. It is not common within the United States culture a movie that critically reflects on the problems derivated from the automobile. On the contrary, in Europe, automobile is the sintome and the sign of unadecuated evolution of our society: alienation, violence, urban problems and deshumanification. The critic to the automobile culture takes here the demonstration of a disagreement that embraces the whole society. Alongside the proper cinematographic productions, CA2M presents other road movies with a more experimental or enssayist character, showing as well other aspects as the extension and adaptability of the proper road movie concept as a construction mechanism. Works as Sophie Calle or Chip Lord acquire greater relevance in aspects such as autobiography, identitarian or culture.

Alberto Martín
Curator of the exhibition Auto. Dream and materia

FR 23 OCT 20:30 H.
Weekend. Jean-Luc Godard. 1967, V.O.S., French 105 min.

A supposedly idyllic weekend trip to the countryside turns into a never-ending nightmare of traffic jams, revolution, cannibalism and murder as French bourgeois society starts to collapse under the weight of its own consumer reoccupations. A car trip by road will be full of unexpected contingences, gestions, accidents and eccentric characters.
 

Fri  30 OCT 20:30 H.
Night on Earth. Jim Jarmusch. 1991, V.O.S., English. 129 min.

A collection of five vignettes taking place during the same night, concerning the temporary bond formed between taxi driver and passenger in five cities: Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Rome, and Helsinki. Cada historia trata sobre la relación que entabla un taxista local y sus pasajeros. Journeys where occur diverse events ranging from comic to dramatic..

FR 6 NOV 20:30 H.
Trafic. Jacques Tati. 1971, V.O.S. French. 96 min.

Mr. Hulot is a bumbling automobile designer who works for Altra, a Paris auto plant. He, along with a truck driver and a publicity agent (Maria Kimberly), take a new camper-car (designed by Hulot) to an auto Fair in Amsterdam. On the way there, they encounter various obstacles on the road. Some of the obstacles that Hulot and his companions encounter are getting impounded by Dutch customs guards, a car accident (meticulously choreographed by the filmmakers), and an inefficient mechanic. In the film, “Tati leaves no element of the auto scene unexplored, whether it is the after-battle recovery moments of a traffic-circle chain-reaction accident, whether it a study of drivers in repose or garage-attendants in slow-motion, the gas-station give-away (where the busts of historical figures seem to find their appropriate owners) or the police station bureaucracy.”

FRI 13 NOV 20:30 H.
Paris, Texas. Wim Wenders. 1984, V.O.S. English 147 min.

An amnesiac man who, after mysteriously wandering out of the Mojave Desert, attempts to re-assimilate his life with his brother, his seven year old son, as well as track down his former wife.

FRI 27 NOV 20:30 H.
No Sex last night (Double-Blind). Sophie Calle. 1992, V.O.S. English 75 min.

In this road movie, Sophie Calle and Gregory Shepard account their road trip across the States.   Both hide behind their cameras as they make the mythical journey westward from New York to California in Greg's troubling convertible. The couple stops in a Las Vegas Drive-Thru wedding chapel and decide to get married, in order to save their shaky relationship, with their cameras recording everything. A road movie fraught with places that the protagonists take distance from. The third character, the car, actively participates during the complete shooting of the film, touting the trip despite being the habitual habitat of Sophie and Greg. Homemade shots with apparently thoughtless shots, reflections on the human condition and on the couple with a exquisite editing which makes such an estrange and active film.

FRI 4 DIC 20:30 H.
Motorist. Chip Lord. 1989, V.O.S. English. 70 min.

El automóvil como icono norteamericano es un tema que siempre ha fascinado a Chip Lord. A "road video" homage to the car culture of the 1950s and '60s. MOTORIST follows the driver of a 1962 Thunderbird as he crosses the Southwest and arrives into Los Angeles, all the while commenting on the road and his personal history with cars. Richard Marcus plays the motorist with a nervous intensity that captures the "white line fever" of a cross-country road trip.

 FRI 11 DIC 20:30 H.
The Devil on Wheels Duel. Steven Spielberg. 1971, V.O.S. English 90 min.

The devil on wheels is one of the greatest representative films where the vehicule become a threat. Indeed, the threat reaches a methaphoric character, an atmosphore of nighmares that refers and affects nature and the surviving instinte of the protagonist, a commercial agent that drives his car and is besieged my a truck. The car is shotted emphasizing its agressive and almost monstrious character, where the truck driver is no the one frightening, but the truck itself.  This humanization of the truck provoques that we get to see it endowed by instinct and will.

FRI 18 DIC 20:30 H.
Little Miss Sunshine. Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, 2006, V.O.S., English 101 min.

The Hoover is quite a conflict family: Sheryl Hoover is an overworked mother of two children who lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her brother Frank is a gay scholar of French author Marcel Proust, temporarily living at home with the family after a suicide attempt. Her husband Richard is striving to build a career as a motivational speaker and life coach. Dwayne, Sheryl's son from a previous marriage, is an unhappy teenager who has taken a vow of silence until he can accomplish his dream of getting into the US Air Force Academy in order to become a test pilot. Richard's foul-mouthed father, Edwin, a World War II veteran recently evicted from a retirement home for using and selling heroin, lives with the family. He is close with his seven-year-old granddaughter, Olive.

Free entry

FR 20 FEB "Om Shanti Om" Farah Khan
SAT 21 FEB "Parineeta" Pradeep Sarkar

CA2M brings a view to the popular India by screening two films. Two productions in the purest Bollywood style reflecting the Indian film industry with its plots.

This activity is parallel to the opening of ARCO, being India the guest country and the exhibition Cultura popular India and Mas Allá. The (emerging) schism never stated at sala Alcalá 31 of the Regional Government of Madrid, CA2M offers a vision of the popular India from films.

PROGRAMME

FEB FR 20. Om Shanti Om, de Farah Khan

India - 2007 - 35 mm, 168 min. Director: Farah Khan
Script: Farah Khan.
Music: Vishal Dadlani, Shekhar Ravjiani, Pyarelal Ramprasad, Sharma.
Production: Red Chillies Entertainment.
Actors: Shahrukh Khan, Deepika Padukone, Arjun Rampal, Shreyas
Talpade, Satish Shah, Kirron Kher.

The purest magic and color from Bollywood brought to us by Farah Khan. The film maker, deeply known by her talent as choreograph, presents her second movie, protagonized by the Bollywood star, Shah Rukh Khan, and new signing, Deepika Padukone, Om Shanti Om is a hommage to the golden age from the Bollywood, with a plot starting in the 70.

Om Prakash, , a two-bit actor, meets a Bollywood film star with whom he is in love. Unfortunaly,  they are not  destiny to live their love in that life, Om dies in a fray. The story comes back to present, where Om Prakash reincarnates in Om Kappor, the superstar from Bollywood 2007. This film looks back at the popular Indian films with a relentless flow of visual resourses, where the greatest stars from Bollywood have cameos with the birthday of the protagonist.

Auditorium
Free entry

FEB 21 SAT. Parineeta, de Pradeep Sarkar.
Director Pradeep Sarkar. India, color, 35mm. 130 min.
Script: Vidhu Vinod Chopra.
Production: Vidhu Vinod Chopra.
Music: Shantanu Moitra. Letra: Swanand Kirkire.
Actors: Raima Sen, Saif Ali Khan, Sanjay Dutt, Vidya Bala.

This film is based on a literary classic, at least with contact points. The film maker knows that he has in hand a subject with legions of viewers. At the same time, he has the challenge of distilling emotions written on the screen with virtuosity. Pradeep Sarkar is successful. And how! He has taken the liberty of passing the scene of his debut film Parineeta, by the writer Saratchandra Chatterjee (author of Devdas) of Calcutta from 1913 to the vibrant and sultry Calcutta from 1962. But beyond the challenge of deploying the classic pages with vivid images on the screen, without subtracting one iota of emotional subtlety to the story and its characters. Shekhar (Saif Ali Khan's idol), son of a wealthy businessman, and Lolita (Vidya Balan radiant), an orphan who lives with the family of his uncle, are neighbors and childhood friends who do not recognize the intense love that binds them together, until a  London manager arrives and creates a love triangle. A refreshing return to the romanticism of the past, Parineeta is a wild and irresistible ride in the purest Bollywood style.

Auditorium
Free entry