Grupos escolares de educación infantil y primaria

“Taking possession of space is the first gesture of living beings, of plants, of clouds and of {human beings}: it is a manifestation of duration, life and balance.”

Carlos Raúl Villanueva (1900-1975), architect.

Before the museum opens to the public and before all the lights are on, while silence still fills the galleries, our security staff open the doors so that preschool and primary school groups can be the first to enter.

They arrive slowly, shyly. But little by little, the museum begins to change. Voices replace the silence, questions fill the air and the galleries begin to come alive with new ways of looking and being.

What happens when a group of children has the chance to make the museum their own? What if their voices could make it theirs—a welcoming place that feels like home, like something of our own, as a public space should? What happens when a primary school group makes the rules for how to be and spend time in a museum? What if they create freely in response to what they discover here? What happens when the group moves through the galleries as if it were a single person, a single being with a movement all its own, invented by the group itself? What if laughter echoes throughout the space, disrupting its constant silence?

This activity invites the group to explore the museum through experience, imagination and collective creation. Through artistic activities, the children will discover the exhibitions as an open territory in which to investigate, experiment, encounter one another and formulate questions. A space to observe, listen, ask questions, reach agreements and try out new ways of relating to the works, to the group and to the museum itself.

The activity offers an active, sensitive and participatory approach to contemporary art. An opportunity for the children to take centre stage in the experience and to recognise how a child’s perspective can open up unexpected paths, transform the spaces they inhabit and enrich the ways in which we all inhabit the museum.

THE INTRUSION. Other Ways of Taking Over Space is the second artistic collaboration between Teresa Serigó and Lupe Estévez, who are beginning to find their feet as “Montañas Sánchez”, the name of the collective that gives shape to their way of seeing childhood through, from, alongside, with and by means of art. Their artistic careers share a spirit of exploration across the varied landscape of art. They enjoy combining theatre, sound, the power of light, words, gesture and movement with nature, drawing on all these disciplines and nuances to accompany children on the creative and emotional journey through life.

“Out of the mud... these seams” is a morning workshop at the Museo CA2M where we invite groups of pre-school and primary school children to come and share stories connected to other forms of knowledge and transmission, using experiences they already practise: gestures, listening, play, telepathy, imagination, dreams...

The stories are shared in the workshop without the need for words. Sometimes they emerge in the form of stitches, sometimes in gestures or silences. The children explore ways of learning and remembering that are not always taught but are felt. The workshop and the exhibition space are a place to come together, imagine and listen with the body, a place where the ordinary is transformed into the extraordinary, and art emerges without anyone naming it.

Adriana Reyes (anthropologist and creator in the living arts field) and Gregoria Batalla Batalla (teacher at the infant school Zaleo, History of the Americas graduate and revolutionary in the art of educating) know a great deal about all of this, which is why we’ve invited them to design this workshop in which the children will turn something small into a new creation; where the body, collective action and other contemporary art forms will be harnessed to create something wonderful out of something small.

In the classroom of the CA2M Museum, there are numerous ceramic pieces that were moulded by the groups that visited us in 2022. With great care, Mr Mateo baked each of them in his school kiln. There, they released all their water, which evaporated and dispersed into the air of Móstoles. The textbooks say that when hydrogen bonds are replaced by stronger, shorter oxygen bonds, the clay shrinks and cannot be reused. That it will never be mud again.

We invite pre-school and primary school classes to take part in collective action to imagine an answer to this question. What can we make with that mud? Leave school and come to the museum in order to touch, change, break, make noise and soften.

Adriana Reyes (anthropologist and creator in the field of living arts) and Mateo Añover (teacher and director of CEIP Antonio Hernández, ceramicist and basketball enthusiast) know a lot about this. We have invited them to design this workshop in which children will turn small things into a new creation where the body, collective action and other contemporary artistic forms will be put into practice to turn something small into something extraordinary.

Last year CA2M started working with the EnterArte teachers’ group. The collaboration gave rise to a workshop exploring the interrelationship between school and museum which exceeded all expectations. This year the project will continue experimenting with the mysterious; an activity inviting us to let ourselves be carried along and discover the space of the museum, paying particular attention to minimum detail, to little things and what normally goes unnoticed.

"Let’s get soaked by a wave, aahh!" is a project working with ideas of transformation, art education and aesthetic play. It is a workshop-parcours-action in which we will experiment with different media, materials and spaces at CA2M for artistic expression.

Anyone turning up to this event will actively generate new narratives with the artworks and spaces at the museum, will compose and decompose, and play. But above all else, they will look at art from a totally different perspective, from childhood. We will imagine new ways and messages to arrive at these new collective narratives and imaginaries.

EnterArte is a group of teachers who work with different areas of education. Its work investigates how to bring art into their respective fields of education. Its mission is to rethink through the filter of art, to take a look at teaching from the optic of contemporary art practice and the relationship between school and museum. Art that reaches out and makes us think and act.