Enrolment free

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).

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.

Last year CA2M started working with the EnterArte teachers’ group. The collaboration gave rise to a workshop exploring the interrelationship between school and museum which exceeded all expectations. This year the project will continue experimenting with the mysterious; an activity inviting us to let ourselves be carried along and discover the space of the museum, paying particular attention to minimum detail, to little things and what normally goes unnoticed.

"Let’s get soaked by a wave, aahh!" is a project working with ideas of transformation, art education and aesthetic play. It is a workshop-parcours-action in which we will experiment with different media, materials and spaces at CA2M for artistic expression.

Anyone turning up to this event will actively generate new narratives with the artworks and spaces at the museum, will compose and decompose, and play. But above all else, they will look at art from a totally different perspective, from childhood. We will imagine new ways and messages to arrive at these new collective narratives and imaginaries.

EnterArte is a group of teachers who work with different areas of education. Its work investigates how to bring art into their respective fields of education. Its mission is to rethink through the filter of art, to take a look at teaching from the optic of contemporary art practice and the relationship between school and museum. Art that reaches out and makes us think and act.

There are sounds that stick in your head, like a sewing machine, or when my mother used to wash clothes outside in our backyard, I remember sitting there listening to the rhythm with which she rubbed the clothes against the washboard, and for me, the sound of a washing machine is hypnotic, the purring motor of a fridge is like a whisper and when it rattles out a whistle I would have the iiiiiiiiiii in my brain all day, and I was never sure whether it was me or the machine, tinnitus, tinkling like flowing water inside your head, and then the silence was terrifying, and depending on your position you could hear your vertebrae because we all have internal, interior sounds and you sometimes hear a beat in your ears like when you come out of a club and keep getting that buzzing, ringing pum-pum-pum, and seeing as I live on the seventh floor all the clock bells sound differently and drive me up the wall. Have you never thought that a repetitive sound is like someone talking? Or maybe a ghost. You have to be very careful with all this, look for places that have voices and for voices that seem like they are not there because they are inside your head, in another world, in abandoned villages in Madrid, in the materials of things. We want to learn a song together, to rustle up a storm, to sing to the stars in Valencia and so on until we embrace all the sounds that exist in the universe.

An Amateur Choir is a creative project that welcomes any kind of voice which wishes to participate. Besides our own experimental sessions every second Thursday, we also have sessions with artists who work with the voice and listening. Some of the people who have passed through our choir are: 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.