Enrolment free

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
 

These months, the exhibitions will be filled with objects we may hover over, see from above or closer up. We suggest walking among them and under them, touching them and seeing what happens in that encounter.

We encourage you to engage in this collective experience, which is open to all types of groups, on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings. Each tour will be different, and we’ll make them up as we go.

We may visit Déjà Vécu. What Has Already Been Lived, the exhibition by the artist Asunción Molinos Gordo, where we may wonder what mysteries the flint of Madrid harbours or what the social life inside the microcosm where human intestinal bacteria live is like.

On this collective tour, we may also wander around 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.

The programme is targeted at any type of group: clubs, organisations or school groups.

Register in advance at 912760227 or educacion.ca2m@madrid.org.

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

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.

Directed by Inés Plasencia, Noemí de Haro and Patricia Mayayo.

The Conference on the Study of The Image is an event dedicated to collective reflection on the theory, practice, semantic openings and contemporary demarcations of visual cultures. It includes a forum for debate, seminar and workshops, as well as a public call for research projects (details below).

This conference is an encounter of artistic, theoretical and activist perspectives on mental health and attempts to address these intersections through specific collaborative artistic practices as well as public participation. Even before the Covid-19 pandemic unleashed a wave of depression and anxiety-related disorders, the question of its impact on particular, very specific communities, as well as critiques of certain medical positions related to their diagnosis and treatment, have increasingly come into the spotlight, overwhelming traditional spaces of legitimisation.

Mental health and its connection to neurodivergence are part of a dialogue that is often tense when it comes to treatment methods and curative principles, as well as with denial strategies used against collective causes: particularly critical areas, such as grassroots activist movements and artistic practice, defend personified positions and denounce the violence and the stigmatisation of a great deal of psychiatric practice.

At the same time, “over-diagnosis” is prone to critique, among other things, because it excludes the most socially marginalised groups, making them invisible. Artistic and activist practices propose definitions and approaches to mental health that focus on more intimate, affective aspects of mental health, as well as the vindication of visions read as neurodivergent and the importance of networks for overcoming collective discomfort.

These spaces and feelings built around the idea of community self-management of mental health find that creating is not only a tool for healing, but also for protest. The conference, directed by Inés Plasencia, Noemí de Haro and Patricia Mayayo, will include talks, participatory workshops, dialogues between artists, presentations of projects and communications selected through open calls, as well as a screening and subsequent conversation with the director.

UAM Coordination: Mónica Salcedo Calvo. This conference is part of the project The audiences of contemporary art and visual culture in Spain. new forms of collective artistic experience since the 1960s (PID2019-105800GB-I00, Agencia Estatal de Investigación). Participants in the programme include: Fernando Balius, Clara López (Mesa Camilla), Ana CSC, María Ruido, Inés Molina, Alicia Utiyama, David Crespo, Sasha Warren, Costa Badía, Silvia Maestre Limiñana, Jesús Etxart, Gemma B. Palacios, Rebecca Tolosa, Toxic Lesbian, Irene García Molina, Rafael Sánchez-Mateos, Fátima Masoud.

INFORMATION NOTE:

• Registration is required in order to attend the conference.
• You can attend individual sessions, but priority will be given to registered participants
• To attend the workshops, you must register for all the conferences. Each workshop lasts 2 mornings. It is only possible to register for one.
• We ask that those who have registered be punctual. If, ten minutes after the start of the first afternoon session, there are empty seats, these may be taken by anyone who has not registered until all the seats are filled.
• Certificates of attendance will be issued for those who attend 80% of the sessions.
•  

PROGRAMME

Thursday 16 November.

11:00-14:00 Workshop: From painting mandalas to stories that tell stories. Part 1. Conversations on madness and collective meaning Fernando Balius*

11:00-14:00 Podcast workshop. Pain as a gift: strategies and rituals for mental health care. Part 1. Clara Lopez (Night Table)*

16:30 Start and presentation of the programme.

16:45 A crazy opening conference. Ana CSC (Locus)

17:30 Debate

18:00-18:15 Break

18:15-20:00 Presentation of projects. Session 1. The world as diagnosis.

• It’s not you, it’s ableism. Costa Badía.
• Clinical Report: F84.1. Silvia Maestre Limiñana.
• “DropExpander” (psycho-magnetic embodiment of interferon on basic biological mechanisms). Jesús Etxart.

Friday 17 November.

11:00-14:00 Workshop: From painting mandalas to stories that tell stories. Part 2. Conversations on madness and collective meaning Fernando Balius.

11:00-14:00 Podcast workshop: Pain as a gift: strategies and rituals for mental health care. Part 2. Clara López (Bedside Table).

15:30-17:15 Presentation of projects. Session 2. The shores of art

•  “What to cure?” Poetry behind the antiseptic tunnel in Anne Sexton, Unica Zürn and Alejandra Pizarnik. Gema B. Palacios
• Sanctity and neurodivergence: minor artistic practices between the abject and the sacred. Rafael Sánchez-Mateos
• Art brut, bruta tú 100mg. Fatima Masoud.

17:15 Break

17:30-19:15 Presentation of projects. Session 3. Own repair

• (Im)possible images. Rebecca Tolosa.
• Tales that are Never Told and In the Wind. Toxic Lesbian.
• Stories of autistic mothers. Research, dissemination, action. Irene García Molina.

19:15 Break

Saturday 18 November

11:00-12:00 Critical positions from the perspective of artistic practice. Conversation with David Crespo and Alicia Utiyama

12:00 Debate

12:15 Break

12:30 The workshop of the mad. Talk by Sasha Warren

13:15-14:00 Debate

14:00-16:00 Lunch break.

16:00 Public presentation of the workshop: From painting mandalas to stories that tell stories. Conversations on madness and collective meaning Fernando Balius.

17:00 Public presentation of the podcast workshop: Pain as a gift: strategies and rituals for mental health care. Clara López (Night Table)

18:00 Closing speech at the end of the conference.

18:15 Screening. State of discomfort. María Ruido.

19:15-20:00 Debate with María Ruido.