Enrolment free

This audio-visual programme is based on the hypothesis that the ecological crisis also manifests itself in the image as a crisis of representation. Like the gap in our modern cultural heritage that convinced us of the difference between culture and nature and taught us to look at the latter from a distance, either as an object of study and exploitation or as a landscape-spectacle on which to project human emotions and adventures, the only stories worth telling.  

Today, some arts are rebelling against this history of ‘disenchantment’ and its impact on visual culture. Wishing to repair the earthly link, they seek other practices of the image that bring with them other ways of being in the world. There is no common pattern to these emerging forms. Some question the word ‘nature’ and argue that there is a continuum between organisms and technologies, infrastructures and ecosystems. Others study the agency or cognition of non-humans or evoke futures of multi-species habitability. Some call themselves films, others audio-visual installations, others film experiences or even experiences of sensory perception. These practices are formally and aesthetically diverse, but draw on a similar vocation: to create visual vocabularies that break with the naturalistic imaginary of modernity and give the world back its enchantment. These new myth-images accompany us, as Bruno Latour would say, on our necessary journey back down to Earth. 

The cycle is made up of four audiovisual works, each of them framed by an introductory activity where we will expand, through the artistic practice of local agents (Coco Moya, Carlos Monleón and Claudia Rodríguez), the central themes they address in relation to the climate crisis and the problems of its representation also in images. With a programme of talks, workshops and collective exercises, they will work in a space for exchange in which to rethink together the current ecological moment. Each day will conclude with a debate between the invited artists, the public and the curators of the cycle.

Note: In order to attend the full programme of activities, prior registration is required.

The screenings are free admission until full capacity is reached.

Tuesday 10th October

• 18:30-19:30h “"In the critical zone. Postnatural landscapes, data centres and trans-scalar alchemies" inaugural talk by the Institute for Postnatural Studies.
• 19:30-20:30h Projection: Armin Linke, "Alpi" (2011, 62min).
• 20:30-21:00h Open discussion to the public with María Ptqk and Institute for Postnatural Studies.

Wednesday 11th October

• 18:30-19:30h  "Club de piedras", speculative workshop with Coco Moya.
• 19:40-20:15h Projection: Cao Minghao and Chen Jianjun, "Observing Point" (2019, 17 min) and "Habitat, Geology and Energy Basis" (2021, 15 min).
• 20:15-21:00h Open discussion to the public with Coco Moya, María Ptqk and Institute for Postnatural Studies.

Tuesday 17th October

• 18:30-19:30h "Un canto de nácar", workshop with Carlos Monleón.
• 19:40-20:25h Projection: Sonia Levy, "For the Love of Corals" (2018, 23 min) and "Creatures of the Lines" (2021, 19 min).
• 20:25-21:00h Open discussion to the public with Carlos Monleón, María Ptqk and Institute for Postnatural Studies.

Wednesday 18th October

• 18:30-19:30h “Volver a la naturaleza”,  "natural" writing workshop with Claudia Rodríguez-Ponga.
• 19:40-20:30h Projection: Ana Vaz, "É Noite na América" (2021, 50 min).
• 20:30-21:00h Open discussion to the public with Claudia Rodríguez Ponga, María Ptqk and Institute for Postnatural Studies.

Audiovisual curator: Maria Ptqk.

Curated and coordinated by: Institute for Postnatural Studies.

Maria Ptqk is a curator, researcher and cultural manager. Born in Bilbao in 1976, she has been working in the cultural sector since 2000. She works as a curator, project manager and consultant. She has worked, among others, with Medialab Prado (Madrid), Azkuna Zentroa - Alhóndiga Bilbao, CCCB in Barcelona, Jeu de Paume Visual Arts Centre (Paris), La Gaité Lyrique (Paris), GenderArtNet (European Cultural Foundation), Donostia-San Sebastián 2016. European Capital of Culture, LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial (Gijón). She has been a member of the Basque Council for Culture (2009-2012) and of the scientific committee of the VI Encuentro Cultura y Ciudadanía (Ministry of Culture and Sport). She has curated the exhibitions "Soft Power" with Proyecto Amarika Proiektua (Vitoria-Gasteiz, 2009), "A propósito del Chthuluceno y sus especies compañeras" (Espace virtuel du Jeu de Paume, Paris, 2017), "Reset Mar Menor. Laboratorio de imaginarios para un paisaje en crisis" (CCC Valencia, 2020), "Ciencia fricción. Life among companion species" (CCCB Barcelona, 2021). She is currently curator of the Getxophoto 2023 festival, advisor to the art publisher and producer consonni and the Chaire Arts & Sciences (École polytechnique, l'École des Arts Décoratifs - PSL, Fondation Daniel et Nina Carasso) and member of the programming committee of ISEA Paris 2023 (International Symposium on Electronic Art).

The Institute for Postnatural Studies (IPS) is a centre for artistic experimentation from which to explore and problematise postnature as a framework for contemporary creation. Founded in 2020, it is conceived as a platform for critical thinking, a network that brings together artists and researchers concerned with the problems of the global ecological crisis through experimental formats of exchange and open knowledge production. From a multidisciplinary approach, IPS develops long-term research focused on issues such as ecology, coexistence, politics and territories. These lines of research take different forms and formats, including seminars, exhibitions and residencies as spaces for academic and artistic experimentation.

‘I didn't expect such a sound to come out of such a small body. It was very impressive, she wanted to do the same with her voice: not to disguise it, but to dress it with other voices, her voice, her throat, as if another voice was coming from inside her, as if she were speaking, not with another, with herself, having a conversation, for example, about what disappears, from babbling to the last breath without passing through the middle, with a new everyone-voice, what would it be like? A mouth with many tongues, a ventriloquist who comes to us to multiply our voices, to transcribe the sound like when that leaf sounded like a twirler, as if it was telling us come on, let's go, its sound, that amplified experience, we had to draw the sound out of the ground, what does that mean? I don't know, it was like a breathing game, I was obsessed with feeling that sound, focusing attention on what you hear after singing, the throat clearing, the swan song with many tongues, the song that accompanies the moment just before going to sleep, doing it until we were voiceless together.’ 

An amateur choir is a creative project in which any kind of voice is welcome to participate. Every other Thursday, the choir does its own research sessions as well as sessions with artists who work with voice and listening.  

Our Amateur Choir has included Sonia Megías, Itziar Okáriz, Jaume Ferrete, María Salgado and Fran MM Cabeza de Vaca, Rocío Márquez, Alma Söderberg, Ainara Lagardon, Jhana Beat, Lolita Versache, Bea Narcoléptica, Luz Prado, Los Torreznos, Makiko Kitago, Julián Mayorga, Agnès Pe, Paloma Carrasco, Anto Rodríguez, Elisa C. Martín, Elena Murcia Pinto with Marina Peralta Murcia, Inma Marín with Jon Cañal and Tania Arias Winogradow with Milo-Andrey Ulises, Rolando San Martín, Amalia Fernández, Elena Córdoba, Raquel G. Ibáñez, Alex Reynolds, Black Tulip, tacoderaya, Mónica Valenciano, Ruth Abellán and Arturo Moya, Ojo Último, Monserrat Palacios and Fátima Miranda, Sole Parody, Enrico Dau Yang Wey, Coco Moya, Veza Fernández and Noela Covelo.   

Todos los trabayos son

para las pobres muyeres,

aguardando por las noches

que los maridos vinieren.

Unos veníen borrachos,

otros veníen alegres;

otros decíen: «Muchachos,

vamos matar las muyeres».

Ellos piden de cenar,

ellas que darles no tienen.

"¿Qué ficiste los dos riales?

Muyer, ¡qué gobierno tienes!!»

Popular lullaby collected by Federico García Lorca in his Conferencia sobre nanas, 1928.

A group of mothers in the physical post-partum recovery period will come together to create the lyrics, melody and rhythm of songs to help their babies sleep.

Luz Prado (Málaga, 1985) Musician, violinist and performer. She lives nomadically, working on the stage through sound. Her practice is based on a constant dialogue with the violin and the encounter with other artists through DIY, dance and noise.

Ángela Segovia (Las Navas del Marqués, 1987) I write as much as I can. I have been publishing with the La uña rota publishing house for years. I think of writing as an open space, or rather, I make an effort not to close it; perhaps that's why I tend to mix genres and disciplines, although for me it's really all the same thing, just writing. Always writing.

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 is structured to include a debate forum, seminar and workshops, as well as a public call for research projects (details below).

This conference offers an encounter between artistic, theoretical, activist and epidemiological perspectives on mental health, in an attempt to think about these intersections through certain collaborative artistic practices and the public’s 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, were increasingly on the table, overflowing traditional legitimising spaces.

Mental health and its connection to neurodivergence are part of an often tense dialogue with 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 claim embodied positions and denounce the violence and stigmatisation of much 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 in creation a tool for healing, but also for protest.

We are looking for papers that reflect on this framework from the artistic and cultural sphere, based on practical work and/or theoretical research (either in progress or complete), with which to build a collective roadmap around the relationship between art and mental health.

Some suggested topics and themes include the following:

• Artistic narratives and genealogies of madness and mental health.

• Intersectional perspectives: feminism, anti-ableism, anti-racism, etc.

• Alliances from art and activism. Strategies of collectivisation of discomfort, stigma and pathologisation of neurodivergence.

• Artistic practices and trauma.

• Ethics in artistic work and the participation of audiences and communities around mental health.

• Anti-psychiatry histories and practices.

• Pathologisation and de-pathologisation of dissidence.

• Political and affective approaches to illness and pain.

• Repressive spaces and mental health: prisons, IDCs, psychiatric hospitals…

Submissions should include:

• The application form (downloadable HERE), including a summary of the message (250 words)

• Brief project dossier (pdf, doc, docx) with a maximum size of 10 MB

All documentation should be sent to the following e-mail address: ca2m@madrid.org. If you choose to include attachments, please follow the instructions outlined on the application form. Communication will be in Spanish.

NB: Those selected will be specifically notified of the time and date they will be participating; regardless, we recommend that you have the availability to attend the three days of the conference, namely 16th, 17th and 18th of November. Each selected person will receive 300 euros following the end of the conference and submission of an invoice, to which the relevant deductions must be applied. Selected participants will be responsible for their own travel and accommodation arrangements.

This conference is being organised by Inés Plasencia, Patricia Mayayo and Noemí de Haro within the framework 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).

With the collaboration of:

Guerrilla Drugstore is a transdisciplinary and antidisciplinary, grassroots action for people who sow utopia and harvest reality. A grassroots pharmacy of medicinal plants that were once oppressed, capitalised, forgotten and made invisible, which are now being revived from Barcelona and beyond through a self-managed, caring network of plant, animal and human beings.

Guerrilla Drugstore arrives at the CA2M Museum, where a new pharmacy will be set up dedicated to menopause-friendly plants. This action creates an alliance between wise women and plants, through the creation of a hanging garden dedicated to the health of women experiencing menopause.

A space will be prepared on the museum’s roof terrace for experimentation with growing plants and textile art where we can offer mutual care, which will include plants with phyto-oestrogenic properties and what we can learn from them. The implicit intention is to promote our well-being by redefining menopause as a time of transformation and deep reconnection with ourselves and with each other.

The workshop will be held in four sessions:

LEARNING FROM PLANTS 19 April 11:30am–1:30pm

We’ll be approaching the subject of plants associated with menopause management from the perspective of participatory ethnobotany and by collectively compiling our knowledge and remedies. During the session, we’ll begin to create the hanging structure that will house the plants.

PLANTING KNOWLEDGE 20 April 11:30am–1:30pm

We will take a closer look at our new friends. We’ll be learning how to plant them from seed and care for them, and about their uses and particular properties. A Guerrilla seed-planting workshop that will unite us forever with these forgotten plants that should have a place in our medicinal garden.

CONVERSATION BY CROCHET 10 May 11:30am–1:30pm

The session is devoted to crocheting the structure that houses the plants. The action of hands interlocking stitches allows words to circulate, creating a space for dialogue, sharing and caring.

INSTALLATION OF THE TEXTILE PLANT STRUCTURE 24 May 11:30am–1:30pm

During the last session we’ll be completing and installing the structure on the roof terrace of the museum, and attaching our plant friends to it. It will be a place of celebration and culmination of the entire process in which we hope to be able to enjoy what we have acquired both on a personal and human level, as well as in terms of ancestral knowledge, as wise women of an ethnobotanical world that is reborn through this project.

Margherita Isola, artist, performer, dancer of Mediterranean origin. She lives and works with no permanent address, currently residing in Barcelona. Her practice involves experiments with different media – dance, installation, performance art, textile art, community art – and deals with such themes as feminism, migration, colonialism and the capitalisation of Gaia – in order to reconsider new forms of life-centric interdependencies. She has presented her work at the ISELP contemporary art centre, Brussels; 2011 Dance Biennale, Charleroi;  Fashion & Lace Museum, Brussels; Choreographic Centre, Rio de Janeiro; National Museum of Natural History and Science, Lisbon; FAAP, São Paulo; and MACBA Studies and Documentation Centre, Barcelona, among others. In synergy with her practice, she has gained experience in the social and educational field by giving workshops for young people and women, mostly in vulnerable situations.

Xisela García Moure is a teacher of agroecology, permaculture and techniques specialising in urban food gardens and sustainable food systems. She has been a member of the Instituto de Transición Rompe el Círculo (‘Break the Circle Transition Institute’) collective since its foundation in 2014, and since that time has been collaborating in all its training and dissemination activities, including lectures on energy transition and visions of new models of society, the most outstanding of which are her Visualización Móstoles 2030 project and the implementation of the Hamacódromo (‘hammockodrome’) In Parque Finca Liana. She has been collaborating with the CA2M Museum since 2013 on its Roof Terrace Food Garden project, and has been actively involved in the organisation and management of urban and semi-urban community gardens since 2009.

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).