Actividad

Just like the end of every school year, we are looking for a special way to kick off the summer. This year we’re inviting the artist Sara Manubens, who will suggest that we collectively create our own House Drag over the course of four days.

‘This workshop uses the tools of the art of drag as creative power for working with ourselves. I am suggesting an open, sensitive space where all bodies, concerns, fantasies, fears and illusions have a place, with the goal of sharing. We want to share who we are, who we want to be, what makes us uneasy and what we reject. And we will transform all of this into artistic material. How? Through drag art technologies: lip syncing, choreography, exaggerated theatre, makeup, humour and vibrant emotions. We’ll do it through friendship and being together, because that is House Drag: a horizontal space of mutual support to make life happier.’

This summer, the museum is turning into a space designed to combat the heat just like it’s always been done: where it’s cool, with no hurry and in good company. Inspired by those perennial places where idleness is fine, this project is turning the museum into a summer refuge where you can simply exist.

La Fresquera is a place where time stands still a little, where you can come read, play cards, talk… or simply do nothing. A place where the cool air is appreciated, like when you used to sit in your doorway in good company with a pitcher of water next to you.

La Fresquera isn’t an activity; it’s an attitude. It’s opening the museum’s doors to turn it into that courtyard, square or porch where you love to be. We’ve prepared a series of comfortable, quiet spaces full of plants where you can feel at home.

We care for your plants. Watering Can Initiative

We know that many people go on holiday in summer and don’t know what to do with their plants. At La Fresquera, we are thinking about them, too, and that’s why we are launching the Watering Can Initiative. From 25 June to 15 September, the museum is offering to care for the plants of the residents of Móstoles. All you have to do is fill out a form to choose the days you want to leave us your plants and tell us how to care for them, and we’ll do the rest: find the best spot for them, water them, even talk to them if needed… Here we treat them like they’re one of the family.

In this last reality bite, we immerse ourselves in brain rot, the infinite scroll where time lost onscreen goes. We are inviting all the artists we have partnered with this year to open up a window onto their private lives through their favourite memes and videos in a unique, shared video-tapping. A relaxed conversation with snacks like a celebration of Internet culture and what unites us on the big screen.

Dear citizens,

We have declared ourselves the mayors of that place called Picnic Sessions 2025 of the CA2M Museum in Móstoles and we’re inviting you to its annual festival.

We’re going to celebrate this festival’s BIG DAY, but we’ve shattered time, so the day will stretch along six Thursdays from 29 May to 3 July.

On the first day, there will be something resembling opening speeches, bingo and a tasting, and the following Thursday we’ll celebrate a kind of dance-and-vermouth and a kind of community meal. The next one will be for afternoon socialising and then the night-time event, and lastly will come the fanfares.

All of these metaphors will involve artistic activities that will be incredible and magical in many ways, including performances, lip syncs, dances, staged pieces, concerts, DJ sessions and more.

The master of ceremonies all six days will be La Sorny, a brilliant club kid. She’ll guide us through this extended, vibrant day of celebrating, doing wonderful things, caring for one another and laughing together, and creating a space where all of this can happen.

Signed: the picnic mayor’s office that loves you.

Lara Brown and Anto Rodríguez.

PROGRAMME ►(download the full programme here)

Based on the different exhibitions, activities and workshops, as well as the museum’s collection, we are suggesting different encounters and viewpoints on contemporary artistic practices and their capacity for influence and social transformation. To do so, we will invite guests, but not only cultural stakeholders and visual artists; that porosity in the title opens up the arena to other creators and disciplines, allowing for encounters with writers, scientists, designers, performers, musicians and more. Our main goal is to break that systematic distance between the general public and the white cube by bringing together different voices around contemporary culture.

Music will be an essential feature that serves as the common thread in each of the activities, and each session will come with a playlist inspired by the topic being discussed. We are suggesting one encounter a month, making a total of eight podcasts.

We invite you to start listening in the flowery, fair-filled month of May and to participate in this new CA2M Museum radio adventure.

Host- Natalia Piñuel Martín

Art historian, cultural researcher and curator. She is the co-founder of the Madrid-based platform Playtime Audiovisuales, where she develops projects for museums and cultural spaces like MUSAC (León), DA2 (Salamanca), Espacio Fundación Telefónica, La Casa Encendida (Madrid), AECID and the Instituto Cervantes. Playtime Audiovisuales has been curating the El Cine Rev[b]elado series at the Centro de Arte 2 de Mayo since 2014. She is the director of the festival project and agency She Makes Noise. She regularly writes in the media and teaches and gives talks about contemporary artistic practices and gender issues. She has programmed audiovisual and performance exhibitions and series and has worked regularly in radio and podcasts since 2018.

#1_Sabina Urraca_The Imagined Universe – Around the María Medem exhibition

Imagen: Andrea Fernández Plata

We invited the writer and editor Sabina Urraca for this first altered, porous gathering. Originally from San Sebastián, she was raised in Tenerife and currently lives in Madrid. She is the author of the novels Las niñas prodigio (Fulgencio Pimentel, 2017), Soñó con la chica que robaba un caballo (Lengua de trapo, 2021), Chachachá (Dueto) (Comisura, 2023) and El celo (Alfaguara, 2024). Her short stories and the translations of some chapters of her books have been published in magazines like The White Review (UK), The Washington Square Review (USA), Picnic (Mexico), Mercurio, Los Bárbaros, Salvaje, Matador and La Pública, and she has contributed to media like El País, El Cultural, Vice and Cinemanía with columns, articles and essays. She has a monthly column in the literary journal Zenda. She has taught writing workshops in Spain, Mexico, El Salvador and Costa Rica. In 2019, she debuted as an editor of Panza de burro written by Andrea Abreu (Editorial Barrett). She was a resident editor at the Caballo de Troya imprint (Penguin Random House) in 2023 and 2024. In 2022, she received a Leonardo grant for creators from the BBVA Foundation. She has just released her new book, Escribir antes, published by Ediciones Comisura. Sabina (the human) lives with Murcia (the dog) who got her name because she was found in Murcia and since then has been a constant inspiration for the human.

We also welcomed input from the visual artist, curator and poet Leto Ybarra and the filmmaker and animated artist David Domingo, AKA Stanley Sunday. The playlist comes with the Austro-Hungarian imprint plus an extra surprise bonus from Sabina Urraca. 

EPISODE #1 ► (Listen on SoundCloud)

PLAYLIST #1 ►(Listen on Spotify)

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.