Anyone interested

Admission free during workshop hours until full capacity is reached. Capacity: maximum 20 people. Open to anyone who is interested.

CA2M’s Vegetable Garden on the Roof has been going for eight years. Over that time, we have experienced a profound process in which many different people have participated, making it a meeting point based on working together and sharing knowledge.

Since its beginnings, the idea behind the Vegetable Garden on the Roof was for it to be a space that would go beyond being an organic farming school and would form a community. This goal has been achieved; today it is a focal point for people with many accumulated years of learning, a place of enjoyment and coexistence based on the practice of agroecology and permaculture. It is also a place for the recovery of traditional knowledge of the farming world and a reflection on the challenges of being sustainable.

Today, the community of CA2M’s Vegetable Garden on the Roof faces the challenge of opening up to new people without forgetting the enthusiasm for research and experimentation that motivates existing participants. This course will give an opportunity to those who are interested in getting started in agroecology and permaculture, at its most basic levels, yet still meet the needs and pace of learning of those who have been protagonists from the start and who require more specific workshops with very advanced content. To do this, during the first part of the course, we will work two hours on alternate Fridays, to give possibilities to those people who due to work or personal circumstances could not attend the conventional schedule.

In collaboration with Instituto de Transición Rompe el Círculo.

PROGRAMMING. THE MOST NATURAL VEGETABLE GARDEN

THE POWER OF PLANTS 11 AM

5 FEBRUARY | Plants That Look after Our Health 1. 11 AM
It is easy to know what the healing powers of some common plants are, but it is not easy to know how to use them. Learn to differentiate medicinal plants, their properties and uses. 

12 FEBRUARY | Plants That Look after Our Health 2. 11 AM
This workshop will teach you how to prepare oils, ointments and simple macerations that can be made at home. 

19 FEBRUARY | Plants That Look after Our Health 3. 11 AM
Delve into the world of natural cosmetics with some simple recipes that can easily be made at home.

26 FEBRUARY | Plants That Look after Our Health 4. 11 AM
Learn about the benefits of having plants at home, which ones are best suited for each room, and how to care for them.

THE NO-PLOUGH VEGETABLE GARDEN 5 PM

5 MARCH | No-Dig Gardening. How to set up a vegetable garden without ploughing the land. 5 PM
The belief has always been that, before planting a vegetable garden, we have to turn over the soil. This system explains why we should not do it and how we can prepare the land for cultivation.

12 MARCH | How To Get Rid of Weeds in a Vegetable Garden (Workshop at Gabriel Celaya School). 5 PM
One of the reasons why we plough the soil is to remove weeds before planting but, in doing so, we provide their seeds with the perfect conditions to multiply. So, what should we do?

26 MARCH | Preparing Raised Beds. Hugelkultur and raised beds. (Workshop at the Gabriel Celaya School) 5 PM
Learn different ways to prepare soil and keep it fertile for as long as possible without having to work it.

9 APRIL | Vermi-Compost at Home. 5 PM
Compost is essential in a “no-dig” garden. Learn how to create homemade vermi-compost using kitchen waste to make your own compost. (waste, composting)

16 APRIL | Seedbeds Using a Biointensive Form of Agriculture. 5 PM
Let’s start planting and preparing our first seedbeds for this spring.

23 APRIL | Biodiversity – above and below. 5 PM
Learn how to maintain biodiversity both on the soil’s surface and in its subsoil, both of which are fundamental for keeping it fertile.

In colaboration with: Instituto de Transición Rompe el Círculo.
 

All the activities at CA2M are for free

Enrolment free:

_ Mover el fuego (23 de octubre)
_ Las cosas te dirán quién eres si las escuchas (6 de noviembre)
_ Volver al fondo (20 noviembre)

We have been left exposed, without a sense of time or the certainty of touch. Our realities have been turned on their heads, upsetting our sense of direction. We want to take advantage of this fluctuation to explore the art of uncertainty, the unknown and the unpredictable, but also what is already being inscribed in the landscape for some time now.

And we will do so on bus trips, spending some time together, stepping outside the boundaries of the museum, mobilising our imagination in other places, thinking about other ways of being together, allowing ourselves to be moved anew, keeping in step in both conversation and listening. We propose pushing the boundaries of the Region of Madrid to see the museum from a distance by visiting places that generate surroundings which allow us to imagine in an unfettered way.

CA2M organises educational activities on contemporary art and thinking that can be framed within the tradition of community colleges. The courses it offers address some of the key issues for a proper understanding and interpretation of art today. These activities can be divided into two parts: the first consists of the presentation of a theme by a guest speaker and the second part involves a debate open to the audience. But this structure can also change to adapt to more experimental formats depending on the guest at each session. For this session we are organizing three bus trips together with artists, researchers and curators to places linked to their artistic practices..

23 OCTOBER. Mover el fuego. Trip with José Luis Giménez + Cuqui Jerez + Maral Kekejian

We invited José Luis, Cuqui and Maral to tell us about their experience as the creative team behind the fireworks for Veranos de la Villa, Madrid’s summer festival, between 2016 and 2019. To this end, we travelled to Villarejo de Salvanés, the town where the Vulcano fireworks factory is located. At the helm of this family-run business is José Luis Giménez, the master pyrotechnic over these years. The performing artist Cuqui Jerez will explain her experience in creating the more choreographic side of the firework displays and the cultural manager and programmer Maral Kekejian will tell us about the genesis of the idea and the role of the fireworks in the festival.  

The goal of the joint teamwork was to create a contemplative spectacle that would set up a dialogue between time and space, form and material, from the idea of celebrating the city, its sky, its parks ... and the art of being together. We will visit the Vulcano fireworks factory in Villarejo de Salvanés so that José Luis, Maral and Cuqui can tell us about the shows they made together, combining choreography with the sky of Madrid. 

José Luis Giménez is a pyrotechnic at Pirotecnia Vulcano. Cuqui Jerez is a performing artist. Maral Kekejian is a programmer.

6 NOVEMBER. Things will tell you who you are if your listen. Trip with Raquel G. Ibáñez

We recount our dreams out of an obscure need: to make them more real by living with someone else the singularity that belongs to them and that would seem to address them one person alone. Maurice Blanchot.

In 2017 the journal Peerj published a report on the research carried out by the physicist Gabriel Mindlin, analysing the neuronal activity of the zebra finch (Taeniopygia guttata) during the day and night and how it is related with its song. Among other things, the study determined that, while asleep, these birds make very different melodies to the ones they make repetitively—as sound patterns—when they are awake. 

In the many interviews Midlin gave about his study of the zebra finch, he underscored a certain radicalness in the fact that these birds were conditioned by a mechanism during sleep that incites them to do things that they do not do during the day: as if the little birds were liberated at nightfall from the inherited and learnt singing of their waking hours. As if there were two different birds. As if the arrival of night-time opened up a wider range of intonations. 

It is impossible to transcribe these sounds by means of a keyboard. Biiibiiip / bipiiiiiiririiiipipi - bi. It’s absolutely futile. They exist even though language fails miserably in the attempt. On 6 November it is very unlikely that we will see the zebra finch awake, although we will try to inhabit those hard-to-explain places like birdsong. This excursion to Robledo de Chavela is an excuse to share the artistic concerns and obsessions of Raquel G. Ibáñez who, throughout the course of the day, will focus on exploring dreamlike experiences and a quest for the impossible. To this end, the duration of this activity will stretch beyond the threshold of twilight.

Raquel G. Ibañez is an artist and curator. 

20 NOVEMBER. Back to El Fondo. Trip with Sofía Montenegro

We were planning a sound trip to Casa de Campo. Looking at the lake, we were talking about floating and how to talk and be heard from the shore, until my uncle got off the boat we were looking at. This encounter closed the last scene in what would be El Fondo con Delfín. The beginning, a trip in a cable car and in between, various intertwined events. One of them, the still unresolved puzzle of how the body of a dolphin suddenly appeared a few years ago in the centre of the park.

Now, another meeting has been called to start afresh and enter once again into the landscape. We will let ourselves be carried along by sounds, conversations and autumn discoveries.

Sofía Montenegro (Madrid, 1988) lives in Barcelona. As an artist, she works with image, sound, text and performative practices.

* Places are limited. The coach will leave at 4:30 pm from the roundabout between Avenida de la Constitución and Paseo de Goya (Móstoles). We will first gather at the entrance to the museum at 4:00 pm. The return will be at 9:00 pm to the same location. During the trip participants are invited to take part in the group reading of a publication chosen for the occasion.

INTEMPERIE ***
 

Anyone interested in art today. No prior knowledge necessary.

A new call will open in December.

(silence) – SSH – SSH – SSH – SSH – SSH – SSH – SSH – (silence) – UUU – UUU – UUU – UUU – UUU – UUU – UUU – (silence) – SSH – SSH – SSH – SSH – SSH – SSH – SSH – (silence) – HEL – LO – HEL – LO – HEL – LO – HEL – LO – HEL – LO – HEL – LO – HEL – LO – HEL – LO – WE – ARE – HEL – LO – WE– ARE – HEL – LO – WE – ARE – HEL – LO – WE – ARE – HEL – LO – WE – ARE – HEL – LO – THE– CHOIR – HEL – LO – CHOIR –HEL – LO– CHOIR – HEL – THE – CHOIR – HEL – THE – CHOIR – HEL – LO – HEL – LO – HEL – LO – HEL – LO – HEL – LO – HEL – LO – HEL – LO – HEL – LO – HEL – LO – HEL – LO – HEL – THEY – ARE– THE– CHOIR – THEY – ARE– THE– CHOIR – THEY – ARE– THE– CHOIR – THEY – ARE– THE– CHOIR – THEY – ARE– THE– CHOIR – WE– ARE– THE– CHOIR– WE– ARE – THE– CHOIR – WE– ARE– THE– CHOIR – WE– ARE– THE– CHOIR – WE– ARE– THE– CHOIR – WE– ARE– THE– CHOIR –

An amateur choir is a creative project in which all types of voices are welcome. The choir doesn’t just sing songs but aspires to embrace all the sounds in the world. That’s why it sings through silence, mumbling and stuttering and with sounds that sometimes involuntarily escape the body like laughter and screams.

During confinement we managed to counter our fears by singing to and with each other over the phone. We find melodies in the washing machine, stories through the window and a new language of gargling and birdsong. Now we are really looking forward to seeing each other in person once again and finally going together to Zarzalejo to sing with the choir of the artist Amalia Fernández.

INTEMPERIE ***

Programme with the support of the Daniel y Nina Carasso Foundation

Admission free, during workshop hours.

The CA2M’s roof garden has been up and running for seven years, a time during which we have lived through an intense process in which many people have taken part, making it a meeting point predicated on working together and sharing know-how.

Since its beginnings, the roof garden was conceived as a space that would go beyond the limits of an organic agriculture school and would form a community. This goal has been fulfilled. Today, the roof garden is the focal point for a group of people who have accumulated many years of learning, enjoyment and coexistence based on the practice of agroecology and permaculture, the recovery of traditional know-how and learning from peasant farmers and a reflection on the challenges of sustainability.

Today, the community formed around the roof garden at CA2M is taking on the challenge of opening up to new people without forgetting the research and experimentation that motivates existing members of the community. For this reason, this year we will be giving an opportunity to all those who are people interested in learning more about agroecology and permaculture, at a beginner’s level, without ignoring the needs and rhythms of learning of the members who have been active since the beginning and demand more specific workshops with advanced contents. For this purpose, during the first part of the year, the workshops will be divided into two categories: beginners (*) and advanced (**). We will also work in two different schedules, to give more possibilities to people who, for personal or working reasons, cannot attend in conventional hours. 

In collaboration with Instituto de Transición Rompe el Círculo.

More information on actividades.ca2m@madrid.org,  on (+34) 912760225, the reception desk at CA2M or at the Rompe el Círculo association. 

PROGRAMME OF ACTIVITIES FOR THE ROOF TERRACE GARDEN

PROGRAMME SEPTEMBER - DECEMBER 2020

ROOF TERRACE GARDEN WORKSHOP (CA2M)

11 September 11:00 - 13:00 | Recovering the kitchen garden **

After the parenthesis caused by the pandemic, we will return to the roof garden and begin tasks of recovery and maintenance.

18 September 17:00 - 19:00 | Starting an ecological kitchen garden *

We will show you the basic principles of organic agriculture and we will begin to prepare seedbeds for the autumn. In addition, we will carry out the usual gardening tasks proper to the month of September.

25 September 11:00 - 13:00 | A kitchen garden in all dimensions **

We will create and place elements in the garden that will allow us to use the space of the roof terrace both horizontally as well as vertically, giving it a more uncultivated look and at once making it more welcoming.

2 October 17:00 - 19:00 | The square-metre kitchen garden *

We will learn new cultivation methods that will help us to maximize production in small spaces. A very interesting workshop for city dwellers who generally do not have large spaces where they can plant.

AGRO-ECOLOGICAL WORKSHOPS (GABRIEL CELAYA SCHOOL)

9 October 11:00 - 13:00 | Gardening in terraces **

We will work with different raised terrace systems and create spaces for planting during autumn in the school garden.

16 October 17:00 - 19:00 | How to make good compost *

We will learn how to make a compost bin and lay the foundations for the production of compost as a key element in our agroecological system.

23 October 17:00 - 19:00 | Creating an aromatic herb spiral I (* and **)
A spiral of aromatic herbs, as well as being a unique and aesthetically pleasing system of cultivation, helps us to understand the specific needs of each plant and how to create the necessary microclimates to grow herbs with very different needs in the one place.

30 October 17:00 - 19:00 | Creating an aromatic herb spiral II (* and **)
We will continue learning how to grow in spiral and will plant the chosen species.

SUSTAINABLE FOOD WORKSHOPS (LOCATION TO BE DECIDED)

6 November 17:00 - 19:00 | The pandemic: the boomerang effect of a diet that destroys the ecosystem (* and **)

We will get this new module underway with a current topic. This year is different. A virus has severely challenged our health, economic and social system. We have discovered that our purported dominion over nature has serious and irreversible consequences. In this session, we will explore in depth how the pandemic is connected with the environmental crisis and the role our unsustainable diet plays in all this.

13 November 17:00 - 19:00 | Eating better to look after the planet (* and **)

In a double, theoretical and practical, session we will first take a panoramic overview of global food production, differentiating industrial production from agroecological production. Afterwards, we will share recipes to help us enjoy new healthier and more sustainable eating habits.

20 November 17:00 - 19:00 | A chestnut celebration (* and **)

Popular festivals in the rural world have always been based on wisdom and respect for the rhythms of nature. In this session, and by means of a castañada, an autumn festival based on chestnuts, we will call to mind popular celebrations based on reciprocity, joy and sustainability. In addition, we will share recipes using chestnuts and other nuts.

27 November 17:00 - 19:00 | Do we know what we eat? (* and **)

The food industry has become so removed from natural processes of food production that today we do not know what the food we eat actually contains. Some of the goals of this workshop will be to look at how to analyse labels, which products are less healthy and to debunk certain ideas on supposedly healthy foods.

11 December 17:00 - 19:00 | A zero-residue Christmas (* and **)

Christmas is a time of the year when wasteful consumption gets out of control. In this session we will think together about alternatives and make sustainable gifts that will allow us to reduce the environmental impact of this holiday season.

18 December 18:30 | Healthy Christmas recipes (* and **)

We propose a workshop with recipes so that our holiday celebrations will be healthy, sustainable and economic and at once very enjoyable. Because it is possible to eat well and surprise family and friends without helping to make Christmas a small environmental disaster.

You can do a lot of things with fire. Clay, earth, can be fired to make all sorts of vessels and containers. Water evaporates and the material hardens, a transformation provoked by fire. We want to undertake a project to experiment with this whole process. We will use clay like in other places and like here, we will use it all.

Fire trees are pieces that burn inside and outside, they are a kiln in themselves, they fire themselves. To this end we need a lot of people, a lot of time, a big space and a lot of fire.

All activities at CA2M are free.

Para que os lo gocéis en casa, el colectivo Autoplacer/Sindicalistas ha preparado “Archiplacer”, una playlist con 101 temas de artistas que han pasado por el festival durante sus diez años de vida. ¡Que lo disfrutéis!

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!

The conjunction was inevitable. While Filmoteca Española (FE), jointly with the publishers Cátedra, were publishing the book La codorniz (de la revista a la pantalla y viceversa), by Aguilar and Cabrerizo, Centro de Arte 2 de Mayo (CA2M) was preparing the exhibition “Absurd Humour” and the book of the same name by the curator Mery Cuesta. To a certain extent, they were forced to get on and, as was the case in hand, “to associate together” in order to jointly imagine a shared variety show. And so, driven by the unbridled imagination of the current confinement, this double programme came about with an evident desire to strike up another equally necessary coupling: a bridge between two generations of comedians with several decades between them. Does the blood of Codorniz humour run through the veins of Chanante humour and its contemporary derivates?

FE and CA2M organized a series of events and rereadings of filmic creations that arose around the satirical magazine La Codorniz run by some of the most outstanding voices in absurd humour today. The playful, surrealist quality of the folly unquestionably runs through the veins of these proposals which, in the second programme, focus on a direct intervention in creations from the past through the optic of the present moment. While Joaquín Reyes dubs fragments of Noticiario de Cine-Club newsreels featuring intellectuals and forward-thinkers from Madrid and Barcelona in 1930, the Tono & Mihura’s “humoristic production” called Un bigote para dos [A Moustache For Two]–“a stupid film for serious people”—is given a revamp by the hands (and voices) of the humoristic practices of Juan Cavestany, Julián Genisson and Lorena Iglesias (members of the Canódromo Abandonado collective) and Venga Monjas.

CAs if they were Jardiel Poncela’s parodic overdubbings of silent movies called “celuloides rancios” now updated to the digital era, the double programme “A Moustache for the 21st Century” goes to clearly show the generational transmission of a kind of nonsense logic humour that ran through Spanish films for many decades, and which is still alive today (at least we believe so) in more contemporary humoristic practices. The connections between Tono & Mihura and Venga Monjas, or between Neville and Joaquín Reyes, emerge naturally, revealing the staying power of absurd humour as a sign of identity of Spanish culture. At the same time, Chanante humour is paired directly with its spiritual forebears, raising absurd laughter. And so to paraphrase the fairground huckster in Verbena: “Step right in [ladies and gentlemen]! Have we a just and moral show for you!”.

SESSIONS

CODORNICESCAS PRESENTATIONS | From 22 May

A whole series of audiovisual productions sprung up around La Codorniz, the most iconic satirical magazine in the history of Spanish popular culture. Today these productions are revisited (and recommended) by the researchers Aguilar and Cabrerizo and the filmmaker Carlo Padial (Algo muy gordo, 2017).

_ Verbena (1941), by Edgar Neville [31 min]. Presentation by Santiago Aguilar and Felipe Cabrerizo.
_ Don Viudo de Rodríguez (1935), by Jerónimo Mihura [14 min], + El corazón de un bandido (1968), by Chumy Chúmez [7 min]. Presentations by Carlo Padial.

SCREWBALL OVERDUBBINGS | From 5 June

The practice of screwball overdubbing, the audiovisual sound and image collage, is an excellent way of creating an absurd humoristic effect. Thanks to Tono & Mihura’s Un bigote para dos, their 1940 screwball film, a comedy rewriting of the dialogue of a Johann Strauss biopic, and to Jardiel Poncela and his “celuloides rancios”, these redubbings were hugely popular back in the 1940s. Today we have chosen the filmmaker Juan Cavestany (Gente en sitios, 2013) and two comedian duos, Julián Genisson & Lorena Iglesias and Venga Monjas, to revisit this vintage comic practice from Spanish culture and to make a new dubbing for Un bigote para dos. The programme is rounded off with a dubbing by Joaquín Reyes, in the style of his “Retrospecter” or “Mundo viejuno” sketches, of a newsreel directed by Giménez Caballero.

_ Noticiario de Cine-Club (1930), by Ernesto Giménez Caballero [31 min]. Fragment dubbed by Joaquín Reyes.
_ Un bigote para dos (1940), by Tono y Mihura [64 min]. Dubbed by (in order of appearance) Juan Cavestany (subtitling) / Julián Genisson & Lorena Iglesias / Venga Monjas.

Last spring we started a workshop for all kinds of bodies which, at the same time, have had all kinds of experiences on dancefloors, parties and festivals. The proposal consists in practicing in trios a series of classic dances for two. We will try to imagine what it is like for three people to dance a tango, a pasodoble or any other dance step. Perhaps it will be much more difficult to follow the rhythm and the steps, but maybe in doing so we will discover new ways of moving.

Tania Arias Winogradow is a dancer, choreographer and now a mother. She works collaboratively with other artists and continues looking for allies to improve her Russian.