Anyone interested

Ciudad Sur is a space of shared experimentation that was launched in 2021 and aims to inquire into the many facets and riches that generate a sense of belonging in cities around Madrid’s outskirts, taking Móstoles as its point of departure.

In this fourth edition of Ciudad Sur, green is going to take us through different landscapes that that have marked the history of Móstoles and of what Móstoles is not in this and other times. With spectral green, we’ll take leaps through time in each session, which will propose a look at more specific issues in this city south of Madrid while also projecting it on a more global scale and connecting with other neighbourhoods and places in order to share and debate different issues that particularly concern us in this tumultuous political and social context.

In this 2024–2025 edition, the coordinators will once again be: Irene de Andrés, the La Liminal collective and the reporting of Blanca Sotos, accompanied by Estrella Serrano, head of the Education and Public Activities department at the Museo CA2M. Registration will be opened on the website at least 15 days in advance for participation in each session. The sessions are held on Tuesdays from 6 to 8 pm. The dates for this year’s edition are:

• 22 October
• 12 November
• 3 December
• 21 January
• 18 February
• 18 March
• 29 April
• 20 May

Irene de Andrés was born in one of the most popular destinations, the island of Ibiza, which has inevitably led her to inquire into the evolution of the concept of leisure and the very meaning of travel throughout history, from the first colonists to tour operators. Spas, cruise ships and discos are key settings for the artist, who uses films, sculptures and graphic works to create journeys through time and around different waters, connecting different historical deeds that make us reflect on the tourist consumption model, which is especially designed for the working class.

La Liminal is a cultural mediation collective which inquires into the city and uses urban routes as a tool for analysing the public space collectively. Our goal is to experiment with the urban landscape to suggest new interpretations that focus on the stories that have been rendered invisible over time, those that we have not valued, in order to build alternative discourses that are based on collective learning and allow us to reappropriate the idea of public space as a common good.

Blanca Sotos (Madrid, 1978) thinks, reads, writes, translates, corrects, edits and publishes different textualities. She has worked as an editor in ministries, publishers and museums and has directed artbook fairs. She has also taught courses and delivered lectures at the Casa del Lector-Matadero, CA2M Museum, Casa Encendida, Sala Mendoza of Caracas, Centro Nacional de las Artes of Mexico, Centro Cultural de España in Mexico, Tenerife Espacio de Artes, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and the Community of Madrid. She has directed marcablanca since 2018, and she and Ramón Mateos are in charge for the first edition of MiraLookBook, the International Meeting of Publications Specialising in Contemporary Culture. She is currently a professor at American University and is pursuing a PhD in the Faculty of Philosophy at the Complutense University of Madrid.

Madrid has a long and little-known Islamic legacy which is intertwined with the city’s history in a way that challenges the political and media discourses that present Islam and Muslims as unwanted, recent foreign arrivals. Madrid was founded in the eleventh century with the mixed name of Maŷrit and is the only current European capital with Islamic roots.

Its first history was written in Arabic, as were the names of its first known inhabitants. For 220 years, Madrid belonged to the broad Arab-Islamic geographic and cultural space that extended from the Duero River to the Sahara Desert, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Indus River. After being conquered and incorporated to the Kingdom of Castile in the late eleventh century, Madrid still had an Islamic presence for 500 more years through its Mudejar, Morisco and slave minorities.

This historical legacy is barely known because the history of Madrid has been recounted in light of its status as the urbs regia, the seat and symbolic embodiment of a power that has been presented as essential and exclusively Catholic and European, which has consequently tended to erase the material and symbolic traces of a past that was considered unsuitable. However, unexpected, subtle phantasmagorias of this past, both tangible and intangible, still exist in Madrid today and even inhabit the icons of Madrid’s identity.

This activity suggests a tour around different spaces of memory to engage in a reflection on the history and memory of Madrid in relation to concepts like identity, alterity, mestizaje and diversity.

Wednesday 19 June. 6-8 pm. Free activity with advance registration. Capacity: 25 people.

Daniel Gil-Benumeya, 1970. He was raised between Rabat and Madrid in a family associated with the imagined and cross-border geography of southern Spain. His academic training is in the field of Arab and Islamic Studies, and outside the academy he was trained in the neighbourhood community of Lavapiés and other areas of Madrid. He is currently a professor in the Department of Linguistics and Oriental Studies at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and scientific coordinator of the Centro de Estudios de Madrid Islámico (CEMI), which is affiliated with the Fundación de Cultura Islámica (FUNCI). His main line of research involves a range of issues associated with the past and present of Islam and populations considered Muslim in Europe. He specifically examines the processes of constructing identity and alterity and the role played by social representations of history and memory in this construction.

Asunción Molinos Gordo and Andrea Pacheco González invite us to accompany them on a special tour of Déjà Vécu, during which they will share some of the research they have done since 2018 which gave rise to this exhibition.

This encounter with the artist and the curator encourages participants to reflect on the traces of the past that still survive today and to question the official narratives about history, cultural hierarchies and the construction of collective identity on the Iberian Peninsula. What has already been lived and what reappears, a concept captured by the title, are the common thread both of the works and of this artist’s inquiry.

The tour will also address Molinos Gordo’s working methodologies and collaboration with other disciplines, such as microbiology, anthropology and the occult sciences. The diverse array of media found in her works—such as installations, drawing, glasswork and video—offer an opportunity to address Spain’s ‘unofficial’ stories through an experience that is both contemplative and critical. In her first solo exhibition in a public institution in Madrid, the artist and curator also examine the exchange with participants in order to assert these stories and their dialogue with the present time.

Dates: Tuesday 30 April 7 pm | Saturday 25 May 12 noon | Saturday 29 June 12 noon.

Capacity: 20 people.

Prior registration free of charge by phoning +34 91 276 02 21 or emailing ca2m@madrid.org
 

We invite you to visit the exhibitions in company on Saturday afternoons and Sunday mornings. One example is Déjà Vécu, the work by the artist Asunción Molinos Gordo, where you may wonder what mysteries the flint of Madrid harbours or what the social life inside the microcosm where human intestinal bacteria live is like.

You can also learn about the different sculptures that Teresa Solar has proposed for the first floor, or go up to the third floor to discover what stories the artist Ana Gallardo has brought back on her journey from Argentina.

Saturdays at 6:30 pm and Sundays at 12:30 pm. Register in advance by phoning 912760221, emailing ca2m@madrid.org or at the museum’s reception.

We are pleased to partner with Amecum on these tours, which suggest different ways to approach the works of these artists.

María Us is a Guatemalan activist who was a guerilla member during Guatemala’s armed internal conflict between 1960 and 1996.

As the outcome of the partnership between her and the artist Ana Gallardo, we are presenting a play in the form of a biographical act which tells the story of a forest that is both the memory of land struggles and the community’s means of sustenance, in an attempt to disinhibit and publicise the resistance of several generations of female bodies violated by their family members and fellow political activists, too.

MARÍA US

I am a woman with K'iche' roots. I speak my native language. Ever since I remember, I’ve worked the land a lot. I went to primary school in my community. What I remember from primary school: most of the teachers were Latino and they would hit and punish us over anything. And they forced us to study or speak Spanish. I liked to play and run, and I imagined that when I was a bit older, I would go far from my family to study and teach the children of my village. Everything changed when the government of Guatemala began to damage and murder. That was my dream no more. I think that schools should not be enclosed; children should not be inside four walls; they should study in a place where they coexist with nature. Someday I’ll teach children.