Anyone interested

Our migrants’ suitcases are filled with twenty-three kilos of life per crossing. Overweight again? What do you carry when you go? When you come back? Yerba mate to while away the time? Coca leaf to blow on God? How much does a house weigh? Did you squirrel away enough money to bring your dog? Was the skin of the soursop still bristly when you unpacked it? What does your baggage smell like? In these four sessions, we’ll be pulp and seed, green and travel, tenderness and bark to recount the southerly-to-southerly winds that blow over the invented territory of the diaspora. Four encounters to open the soursop (not the melon) and use storytelling to explore the interstices of all our creatures/children.

We invite you to journey through this writing laboratory made up of four interconnected sessions led by Sudakasa: Lucrecia Masson, Gabriela Wiener, Chinî and Hildy Quintanilla Ocampo (Q´inti- Colibrí).

The workshop dates are:

• Friday 29 November 6:30–8:30 pm
• Saturday 30 November 12–2 pm
• Friday 13 December 6:30–8:30 pm
• Saturday 14 December 12–2 pm

Participants must attend three of the four sessions to earn an attendance certificate.

Sudakasa is a community writing and creation space based on migrant experiences; it is a refuge-home and artistic residence that has come to cover our lack of a ‘people’, because our people are across the sea. We have re-appropriated this parcel of olive and almond trees and grapevines from insult and turned it into body, identity and memory of the diasporas so together we can weave other stories of resistance that confront the violences against those from down under.

Lucrecia Masson Córdoba. With impurity as a principle, she is a writer, artist and researcher whose main topics of inquiry are bodies, animalities and other-than-humans. From an anti-colonial stance, she works in different artistic registers, primarily experimenting with writing. What interests her in theory is imagination, and she willingly believes that we cannot think without the body. She published Epistemología rumiante (2017) and Escrituras rumiantes. Cuerpo, exceso, animalidad (2022) and has participated in numerous anthologies. She is a member of the Colectivo Ayllu, with whom she has published Devuélvannos el oro (2018) and participated in events like the Sydney Biennial (2020 and the 35th São Paulo Biennial (2023).

Gabriela Wiener. She is a Peruvian writer and journalist living in Madrid. She has published the books Sexografías, Llamada perdida, Nueve Lunas, Huaco retrato and Dicen de mí and the poetry collections Ejercicios para el endurecimiento del espíritu and Una pequeña fiesta llamada eternidad. Her first stories were published in the narrative journalism magazine Etiqueta Negra. She was a columnist for The New York Times in Spanish and the editor-in-chief of Marie Claire España and has contributed to many international media. She publishes a weekly column for publico.es. She won the National Journalism Award in Peru with a report on a case of gender violence. She is the creator of different performances that she has staged with her family. She wrote and starred in the play Qué locura enamorarme yo de ti. She is a member of@Sudakasa, a collective migrant art and writing project. Undiscovered, the English translation of her novel Huaco retrato, was a finalist for the 2024 International Booker Prize and PEN America. @gabrielawiener

Chinî. She was born in Ka'aguasu, Paraguay, in 1987 during the Alfredo Stroessner dictatorship. She is a poet and marica 108, studied biology and researches frogs and toads from Piribebuy. She migrated to Madrid in 2019, following her mother and sister. She has been a Guaraní Jopará speaker since childhood and adores tereré and mbeju. Professionally, she is currently an arborist and keeps watch over the El Pardo forests in Tres Cantos. She is working on her poetry collection Corpus infecciosa/ 30 comprimidos/ suspensión oral, which examines the wound of HIV-AIDS, migratory sorrow and the traumas of a healthy-ill body. She thinks that the virus has come to her body to rummage through her past and heals it with plant-based remedies. She has been dreaming in Guaraní from the Paraguayan city of Ka'aguasu surrounded by soy harvests and the absence of her mother.

Hildy Quintanilla Ocampo (Q´inti- Colibrí). She is a stage creator, poet, willakuq (storyteller), researcher of Andean theatricalities and oralities and a Qoyllirit’i pilgrim as part of the Quispicanchi nation. In Madrid, she is developing the self-managed Arguedas, Oraliteca Migrante project, which brings Andean and Latin America orality and literature and teaches the Quechua language via Escuelachallay, my little Quechua school in Madrid, as practices that aim to strengthen migrant identities and intercultural dialogue in Spain.

Odd Dance is a workshop for all kinds of bodies with all types of experience on dance floors and in festivals and ballrooms, where you can practise classical couple dances in a trio. It’s harder to keep the beat and steps of a dance with three people dancing, but this is precisely what makes us learn new ways of moving.

Odd Dance is a workshop where the simple action-question of translating classic couple dances for two into trio dances for three, or five, or seven, will provide us with the framework of joint investigation and creation in which we’ll get in touch with each other and our own bodies, the bodies of others and the world around us using movement and dance as a means of bonding and creative expression.

Oihana Altube is a dancer and choreographer who is also trained in dance movement therapy. She works on the margins of dance and the live arts.

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.