Otras

On the occasion of International Museum Day, the CA2M opens on Monday 18th of May, and invites you to get to know the storage areas of the Center with the Museum's Conservation team. The CA2M Collection consists of over 1600 works of art from all artistic disciplines, which are joined by over 300 works by 224 artists from the ARCO Foundation Collection, in deposit at the CA2M since last year. The sum total of both collections constitutes a key set of works in order to understand contemporary creation, since they collect the main trends in art from the second half of the 20th Century until today.

ADVANCE BOOKING

We have abandoned the voice on our performative walkthroughs in order to let silence speak for itself. A silence that is able to talk and tell others what only the body is able to tell. We will explore the museum without saying anything but remaining attentive to everything, inventing a way of walking while at once looking at and listening to everything. We will follow the trail of those who went before us, and we are going to intensify the moment by emptying it of words.

On Monday 18 May we will be celebrating International Museum Day, with this year’s theme of “Museums for Equality: Diversity and Inclusion”. Despite the fact that our doors are still closed, we will celebrate the importance of institutions like ours throughout the whole week on our social media.
 

We will begin by defending the essential role played by all the people who have continued working in the museum throughout the confinement: security and cleaning staff, who ensure that it is maintained in optimum conditions for the day when we are able to return. For many years now, we have been refocusing our collections so that the acquisitions we make respond to criteria of equality, for instance enhancing exhibitions by women artists who still do not enjoy the institutional recognition they deserve. Besides our commitment with gender inclusivity, we are also working to ensure the visibility and representation of all forms of life, expanding the LGTBIQ perspective in our programming and collection, but also introducing intersectional criteria that includes raciality: it is fundamental to focus on issues of racism and our own institutional role in its networks of exclusion, a task that is still a long way from being completed.
 

Here at CA2M, many unexpected situations take place in the encounter between visitors and the material culture preserved here. The exhibition halls are a place where we can meet strangers, but there is also a peculiar physical encounter between objects and people. We believe that life in the museum, to be completely inclusive, has to be aware that it is a space of coexistence, a place where the aesthetic experience enables us to recover the magical dimension of things and species.
 

In May 2007, the Mexican artist Damián Ortega installed Obelisco transportable in Doris C. Freedman Plaza in New York. This obelisk on wheels is a biting comment on the displacement of the centres in big cities and the stability of symbols of power in the city space. Today this obelisk is in Móstoles, lying prostrate in our storeroom. It could be raised to its feet (or wheels) any given day here in our own halls or could travel to some other place, to mark the spot of a new centre. The screens of our smartphones or laptops become our portable exhibition halls, places of power where discourses and reflections are directed, affecting our emotions and consciences or helping us to imagine a new representation of the world. The radical experience of the body’s relationship with everything else will still have to wait another few weeks, when we open our doors once again and brush the cobwebs off the exhibition on absurd humour in Spain. But this museum, CA2M, will continue latent like a sleeping portable obelisk.
 

Happy International Museum Day!

After a long slow time spent in conversations and encounters with amateur collectors connected with the museum, we are now launching a publication about some of the things they have been telling and showing us. We invite you to read, observe and get involved in these collections.

Agua de Borrajas is a publishing project created by CA2M’s education department in conjunction with the Roma printers.

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