Anyone interested

The third edition of the CA2M Museum Cuttings Exchange will take place on the afternoon of Tuesday, 28 March. It is a time to share knowledge, bring cuttings and barter seedlings to make our homes greener and less boring.

Although the Cuttings Exchange is mainly about indoor plants, you are welcome to bring plants of all kinds to share. Bring the ones you don’t want, and take home the ones you like best. In addition, on this occasion, we will be holding a kokedama workshop so that you can take your new plant home ready to place in its final location.

This Japanese technique for making hanging baskets from organic materials is perfect for small plants and cuttings, such as the ones we’ll be sharing share in the Cuttings Exchange.

Bring your cuttings or unwanted plants in a small pot with soil or in a small cup wrapped in a wet napkin. Exchange them for the ones you like best.

Don’t miss out! Drop in anytime between 6pm and 8pm, and come and learn with us.

Our interest in these temporary encounters is to focus on the construction of knowledge through experience, rather than on the transmission of knowledge. We will start from the viewers’ point of view and how they see art at present. This will allow us to turn this time into a space for encounter in which the participants are not objects receiving an education, but subjects who collectively develop a critical discourse on contemporary works of art. In this way, visits will focus on a limited number of works in order to give rise to a more profound and open reflection, thus avoiding the more superficial exhibition itinerary and the idea of a single discourse. 

Welcome to Una Vibración Casi Imperceptible (‘An Almost Imperceptible Vibration’), a positional, performed visit that uses the audio guide as a tool to explore the exhibition put together by the artist Jon Mikel Euba, Animals That Bear the Weight of Mysterious Loads in Settings Created by Opposing Forces.

We invite you to enter a choreographed landscape that comes into existence as we walk through it and asks: where does your body end and this landscape begin? An experience to relive the past, time to hear, see and perceive what is vibrating and not visible to the naked eye, to stop before a reflection or an impulse, to ask ourselves: what is this landscape doing to us?

The body has no eyelids; it is a porous membrane that absorbs sensory stimuli and turns them into experience and knowledge. Shall we go for a walk? Bring your headphones.

Activating impulses, working from the experiential, promoting critical attitudes through action, involving the body in the learning processes and questioning social institutions. The CA2M Museum’s Department of Education and Public Activities is developing a line of work aimed at putting together themed visits in which artists and creatives are invited to bring the exhibitions closer to the visitors through their own artistic practices. This allows us to eschew the presumption of objectivity in the narratives put forward by the exhibitions by offering a break with hegemonic discourses. A space for research in which to encourage one’s own readings of the image and story, resulting in the creation of new archetypes.

Paulina Chamorro. I am a researcher, creative, performer and cultural manager. I work in the field of the performing arts in Latin America and Spain. I continuously collaborate with artists, collectives and institutions on projects that promote research and the creation of transdisciplinary dramatic languages engaged with contemporary issues.

REGISTRATION: By telephone on 91 276 02 21, by e-mail at ca2m@madrid.org or in person at the museum reception.

Facilitated by: Adriana Reyes, Carolina Sisabel and Manuela Pedrón Nicolau. 

Thickets emerge everywhere, in seemingly hostile or meaningless terrain, with the ability to feed on what they can find to create a highly resilient system. Some take root around edges: for instance, where a stone falls on rough, dry ground. Their presence both camouflages and blurs the boundaries between objects that sustain their spontaneous and intense growth. By examining its internal cohesion, we are able to review knowledge that can only ever exist in that place. In this sense, a thicket is never just a thicket. Within it lies a unique network of knowledge, of resistances, of desires, of connections, of nourishment, of form: a soup through which its close and intimate materials take root. A way to the knowledge that comes with growing in whatever way it can.

The new edition of the Open University is dedicated to communication with non-human life forms, the knowledge that these connections offer us and their possibilities in sensible production. A diverse group of guests will show us different forms of knowledge and methods that intersect in the territory closest to us, the one we inhabit, and from there we will draw on them, not from the fallacy of the autochthonous, but from simultaneity. In them and between them, there is friction, overlaps, clashing codes and the assimilation of imposed forms in a combination of experiences, languages and bodies. Here, artistic, technological and ritual practices are called on to allow exploration of ways of accessing the knowledge that relationships with other forms of life and spirituality make possible in order to understand our environment. We rely on a metabolic type of learning, which assimilates and deforms, to set up an experimental session in the Open University, to walk through the facility, to snoop around the edges and to savour concoctions. 

As a prelude to each of these sessions, we will meet half an hour before each session in different spaces of the museum to share readings and experiment with the ingestion of plants.

The CA2M Museum designs a series of training activities in contemporary art and thought in the tradition of open universities. These courses address some of the considerations that are fundamental for the understanding and interpretation of art in the present day. They are structured into two parts: the first consisting of the presentation of a topic by a guest lecturer, and the second posing questions for debate that allow the audience to take the floor. This structure may change to favour more experimental formats depending on the guest lecturer at each session.

You can apply for course accreditation, which requires attendance at 5 of the sessions.

Thicket is a continuous process of investigation that systematises the times, ideas and experiences shared in recent years by the team comprising Manuela Pedrón Nicolau, Carolina Sisabel and Adriana Reyes through artistic practices and friendship.

Manuela Pedrón Nicolau is a curator and educator in contemporary art. Her work particularly deals with questions related to artistic research and forms of narration that explore the social and political aspects of this field. She is particularly interested in the more ritual dimension of artistic practices, an interest shared with Adriana Reyes that has led them to become facilitators of this experimental session. Something we don’t know we know, but we do know. She was a member of the Catenaria collective, and together with Jaime González Cela has curated exhibitions at different centres and directed programmes of activities, such as CRÁTER at the Sala de Arte Joven in Madrid, VENECIA at La Casa Encendida and Tabacalera//Educa at Tabacalera Promoción del Arte. She has held art residencies at the Royal Academy of Spain, Rome; Hangar, Barcelona; and Centro Huarte, Pamplona.

Adriana Reyes Rosón is an anthropologist and creative in the field of living arts. She has a master’s degree in feminist studies, undertaken specialist studies in sexualities and diversity, and has trained with different creatives in Spain, Brazil and Portugal. She is interested in social sciences, the living arts, transfeminist studies, spiritualities and forms of plant life, diverse fields that are also sources of pleasure and action in her daily practice.

Carolina Sisabel has a degree in architecture and a master’s in psychoanalysis and the theory of culture. Her field of interest encompasses both landscape painting and dream states in relation to the intermediate, ambiguous, subterranean and unconscious zones at the crossroads between architectural-urban space and the psyche. Her creative practice ranges from architecture and the performing arts to writing and publishing, and she exhibits and publishes on platforms in Canada, Switzerland, France and Chile. In Spain, she has collaborated on several projects with Adriana Reyes, writing three publications dedicated to metabolic documentation, as well as a great friendship.

PROGRAMME

• 22 February. [...] vamo pal monte Palo Yaya (‘Let’s go to the bush, Palo Yaya’). José Ramón Hernández 
• 1 March. Rediscovering the plant spirit: relationships between plants, lands and individuals. Júlia Carreras Tort
• 15 March. You. Clara Montoya and Teresa Vicente.
• 22 March. Reverse agential (dis)orientations (or any which way) Laura Benítez Valero.
• 29 March. Healing plants. Collective transvestite contrabotanic invocation. Iki Yos Piña and Cacao Díaz.
• 12 April. The thing is not to think too much, but to give a lot of love. El Primo de Saint Tropez and the Discalced Carmelite Nuns of Toro (Zamora).

Odd Dance is a workshop where you can practise typical partner dances as part of a trio. It is designed for all types of individuals who have had all kinds of experiences on dance floors and in nightclubs and ballrooms. Dancing in threes means we will have to arrange ourselves in a different way, and the resulting movements and dances will be radically new. 

 Throughout this workshop, many of the binary assumptions that have accompanied the history of dance and dancing will be questioned. Its main objective is to find other ways of connecting with dance and its history, in order to enjoy the most beautiful and vital aspects that dancing as a community offers us: the pleasure of feeling part of something shared, the joy the body feels when it is moved, the surprise felt when the invisible and the unknown become manifest, the magic that comes from bodies being in tune with the world, the sensation of creating meaning as we dance. 

Oihana Altube is a dancer and choreographer who is trained in Dance Movement Therapy. She works on the margins of Dance and the Living Arts.

 The previous editions of Odd Dance were facilitated by Tania Arias and Mónica Valenciano.

Various authors, whether from the perspective of science fiction literature, like Octavia E. Butler, or contemporary feminist theory, like Donna J. Haraway, advocate the need to overcome certain concepts that condition our contemporary understanding of the world, such as the Anthropocene, and to propose other alternatives, like the Chthulucene, in order to rethink a relationship between species that leaves behind the primacy of the human being as the centre and measure of all things and explores the potential of this relationship to generate new ways of life and possible new more sustainable and solidarity worlds for all species that inhabit it, that allow us to survive the current situation of climatic emergency. From Haraway’s notion of “companion species”, this film season wishes to examine how cinema—understood as a popular manifestation of contemporary anxieties—explores the relationship between species and the human being’s relationship with their environs from various optics; some more catastrophic and others more hopeful, in consonance with Haraway’s vision.

The cult film Phase IV, a canonical example of the apocalyptic sci-fi movie, introduces us to a dystopia in which ants develop a group mind and consciousness of their power and take over control of the Erath, forcing human beings to adapt to the new civilization in which both species have to live together. On the other hand, Soylent Green, another classic sci-fi movie, and a visionary example of the destructive effects of climate emergency, takes a look at the capacity of the human being to destroy the environment in which the Earth must survive.

From a less catastrophic, although no less unsettling perspective, Little Joe reflects on the capacity of science to force this collaboration between species through genetic manipulation and how its form of perverting the course of nature means that it does not always serve human purposes in the way it was intended. The purported supremacy of the human species is brought into question when the modified plants overturn the relationship of power and find ways of surviving that make use of the needs of the people who created them.

Meanwhile, The Shape of Water, Border and Gunda offer gazes that anticipate a less-human oriented future with more interspecies collaborations. Gunda borrows the narrative and formal structures of the documentary to follow the daily life of a pig, two cows, and a one-legged chicken, reminding us that we share the world with millions of different species that deserve to be taken into account and appreciated by us within their own environs, with their own everyday routines and with the same compassion with which we observe ourselves. Border takes a look at how we construct a non-human identity in contemporary Finland and how to develop networks and structures for coexistence between two species—humans and trolls—despite their shared disturbing past. Finally, Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water is a melodrama telling the love story between a woman and an amphibian man, opening the door to a relationship between species like those told by Octavia E. Butler in her sci-fi stories. In conclusion, this film season wishes to offer and explore ways in which film imagines us, how it thinks of other species and our relationship with them and thus anticipate the various worlds in which we will have to live.

Curated by Jara Fernández Meneses and Estrella Serrano Tovar.

Jara Fernández Meneses has curated film seasons for institutions like MNCARS and Cruce, and formed part of the programming team for Cineteca for four years and is a former member of the selection committees for the Documenta and Animario international festivals. She has written film reviews for Cahiers du Cinema. España/Caimán. Cuadernos de cine, cultural reviews for Serie B and has taught film classes in Kent and Exeter universities in the UK and at the Carlos III university in Madrid. In her free time, she likes to deejay vinyl records of black music and to play dominoes.

Estrella Serrano Tovar has worked in institutions like MNCARS, AECID and the Cervantes Institute. Naturally curious, she enjoys learning new ways of interacting with culture and art, understanding relationships with neighbouring communities as a key part of her work and trying to connect with people with shared interests to undertake new projects. She is the head of the Education and Activities department at Museo CA2M since 2020.