Escuelita

CURATED BY JULIA MORANDEIRA AND MANUEL SEGADE

La Escuelita at CA2M is an informal school, a living research organism transversal to the art centre that operates as a laboratory for non-traditional forms of production and transmission of knowledge. A programme of low intensity strange studies, a formless mass of experiences and knowledge, a device for promiscuous learning.

The issues addressed and the programmed debates are underwritten by the discursive urgency and desire that emerge from the context in which we work —CA2M and the region of Madrid— sending out explorative tentacles towards other ideas and practices. And so, in a symbiotic relation with the current exhibition programme focused largely on performativity, orality and the body, the second season of La Escuelita is based on the infrastructure set in place during the first edition in order to rethink the body around the catalysing concept of social choreographies. The term alludes to those forms of experimentation in the field of aesthetics that generate hitherto unforeseen social representations and ways of life. Social choreographies can therefore be understood as those places of cultural negotiation in which aesthetic norms are rehearsed and shared according to the social formations they produce. Or perhaps the opposite is true and it is the typologies of social interaction that are able to generate new artistic forms. In any case, these aesthetic political dances face us with an understanding of the individual and collective body as a contaminated archive of regimes of representation but also as the battlefield in other sensibilities and textures of history are negotiated, inscribed, interpreted and short-circuited.

The programme is made up of an interconnected mishmash of embodied histories, minor narratives and dissident gestures.

The various sessions will bring into play sonic, performative and corporal strategies of readings against the grain of History, that put forward radical fictions and imaginaries and recompose both the past and the future. They will focus on the intersectionality of gender, class and ethnicity, on the politics of dance and partying, and on the potentialities and material practices of style, glamour and nightlife. The discourse on affective economies in times of neoliberal malaise will also infect the programme, with a view to firing the imagination and creating coalitions.

All sessions are public and open. Anyone interested in joining La Escuelita, should send an email to recepcion.ca2m@madrid.org

SESSIONS

17 OCTOBER

History is a choreography threatened by every new pose

Introduction to the working lines of the second season, with the concept of social choreographies and the idea of radical performance.

24 OCTOBER

behind the red pool in the deep sea lie the soldiers, with Magui Dávila

Performative lecture-remix of sounds and resistances of an Atlantic musical geography which embraces industrial and rave techno to Afro-American and Latin-American sound systems throughout history.

Re-inscripción es un proyecto de publicación en curso, en fase de investigación y escritura. Ganador del Premi Miquel Casablanca, Barcelona, 2017.

31 OCTOBER

Counter-currents of Black Atlantic

Conversation on sonic fictions, cultural circulations and contaminated histories of the Black Atlantic.

7 NOVEMBER 

A History of Ha!, with Sabel Gavaldón

A journey through the timeline of remixes, appropriations and culture wars around the ballroom beat “Ha Dance”.

14 NOVEMBER

Ensayo Editorial vol. 1

First session in re-signification, translation, debate and collective writing of the constellation of key notions that compose social choreographies.

21 NOVEMBER

Reading Paris is Burning, with Manuel Segade

An essay on affective coalition based on oral and visual appropriations of ballroom, Latino and Afro-American voguing in the moment of the AIDS crisis in New York.

28 NOVEMBER

Re-inscriptions, with Diásporas Críticas.

Workshop in reading-performance on the intersection and inscription of virus, social control and politics of the body.

12 DECEMBER

Session with Rafa Marcos Mota

Exploration of material practices of glamour as rupture and potentiality of the body, desire, fantasy and appropriation from a subjective, sensitive and tangible perspective.

19 DECEMBER

Beauty Salon

Politics of style, make-up, hair and nails.