Enrolment free

The Under-21 team is a group of young people from the ages of 16 to 21 who are interested in culture, art and community life.

We focus on artistic practices that foster dissident attitudes and collective processes of creation.

Our way of working is in constant evolution. It almost seems like a miracle now to be able to physically meet up in the museum to share time, but it is important to us.

In the new 2022-2023 school year we wish to recover the museum with meetings and hook-ups with artists and collectives, to don high heels, to think about unsustainability, to think about small ways of changing our world through art and to adopt to changing circumstances like chameleons.

We are launching a call to increase the team and so begin with greater strength. Join us and discover the team!

If you are interested, enroll HERE

At the end of every school year we like to think of a different way of starting the summer. This time, the artist Pablo Durango will pay us a visit to lead a workshop exploring new artistic strategies.

The workshop will examine the possibility of building an alternative narrative of our own identity.

Using various techniques like drag, storytelling and playing, we will set off on a journey to different realities and potential fictions.

Opening the portals to other dimensions, transforming our bodies and telling ourselves impossible stories is the point of departure on a journey to Multiversal Arcadia where the only limit is our imagination.

Young people from 13 to 21 years of age

18-21 July

11 am – 2 pm

REGISTER HERE

Everyone dreams of flying, the artist Olga Diego tells us, but if you haven’t yet dreamed of flying, there is still time.

During the last school year Universidad Popular took up the challenge to bewitch us again with art, to rediscover the ability to inspire awe. Starting out from this idea, the museum’s educational department has conceived this year’s programme as a place where the incredible can happen because it makes us believe in it. The sessions will focus on thinking about or experimenting with occult practices related with art that subvert scientific logic and conventional forms of knowledge: art practices that deceive the eye, that work with the inexplicable and turn lead into gold.

The course will use a series of publications which will be available for consulting at the CA2M library. In addition, before each session, we invite participants to join in a group reading of a publication selected for the occasion.

CA2M organises further educational activities in contemporary art and thinking within the tradition of community adult education centres. Its courses address some of the fundamental issues for a proper understanding of art today. They are divided into two parts: the first consists in the presentation of a theme by a guest speaker and the second consists in opening a debate to all participants. This structure can change to accommodate more experimental formats introduced by the individual guest speakers at each session.

SESSIONS

24 OCTOBER
Make Yourself Matter to Someone

Raisa Maudit is preparing a performative conference which will explore the laws of desire in force both in the practice of magic and the occult as well as in art. Through a survey of different occult practices ranging from the nineteenth century until the present moment and the core axes of her artistic and curatorial work, we will address questions on dissident identities, surviving the system, inhabiting darkness, and how to achieve your desires but only perishing a little in the attempt.

Magic is the definitive art. We understand Magic and the Occult as all those processes that are based on symbolism and imagination which, through actions and words, wish to affect their surroundings by engendering changes and transformations in natural laws, in space, in time, in bodies, in psyches and in identities. No form of magic is possible without putting it into practice. In magic, practice starts out from an almost suicidal openness to leap into the unknown and letting it hit you with all it has got. It is based on questioning each and every one of the things that we take for granted. Magic hopes to alter the very weft of reality itself. Magic and Art have points in common such as speculation and the allegorical but at once they have a beef in which Art always loses out. We will take a look at Dion Fortune and psychic self-defence, The Craft, otherkin identities, vampires as the definitive evolution, demonology, Magic Battles, neuro-divergent rebellion, and how to get your hands on a free home.

Raisa Maudit is an artist and curator
http://raisamaudit.com/

31 OCTOBER
Queer Spirituality as Resistance. Yet Another Path in the Conspiracy.

Diego Rambova will lead us on an exercise in fragmentary mapping through a range of contemporary performative practices which are presented as a kind of common ground between new age and queer politics, revealing how, both for the artists who propose them but also in their own right, the confluence is a powerful site of agency, resistance and transcendence. Represented by artists of different ages and from different origins around the world from the seventies onwards, they appear under many different guises. But the truth is that they all respond—as we shall see—to the same “conspiracy”.

Diego Rambova is an artist and researcher.
www.diegorambova.com 

7 NOVEMBER
Performance Lecture for Flying

Is it possible to fly? We all know that you can, but … What happens when you realise that you can fly on your own? This lecture explores the irrational desire to fly and its materialisation in artistic creation, in manifold studies and calculations, prior sketches in flight books, failed attempts and disappointments. And also the involvement of the public. Flight artefacts built from a sculptural gaze and attempts to fly as performance art.

We will take a look at, among others, the projects created by Olga Diego since 2003, when she managed to take to flight on the beach of Carabassí in Alicante, as well as other flights with cameras in the Western Sahara and in Salamanca, or more interactive projects like the one developed by the University of California in 2017.

Olga Diego is an artist
http://olgadiego.blogspot.com/ 

14 NOVEMBER
Just as Up is Down, Down is Up

In this lecture Marian Garrido has devised a walkthrough of the symbolic dimensions of lost forms of knowledge and the narrative constructed through the bonds between art and magic or alchemy. Is there really any difference between an extract from The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, in which Carlos Castaneda learns to fly guided by the expert hands of a shaman, and the experiences related by Terence McKenna or Douglas Rushkoff in Cyberia in a framework of comparison with online culture; virtual realities, flight simulators, videogames or the visual rendering of almost vaporous omniscience in Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void and neo-touristic journeys in Google Earth?

Marian Garrido is an artist and researcher
www.mariangarrido.com 

21 NOVEMBER
Angels of Anarchy. Modern Shamans, Artists of the Invisible

Servando Rocha reveals to us a secret tradition that unites art and magic through the masked figure, both in popular culture as well as in movements like Dada or Surrealism which were fascinated by the primitive, the mask, the world of spirits and the unknown. The intervention includes a Cabinet of Curiosities of the world of secret societies and masking as a tactic but also as transformative potential.

Servando Rocha is a writer and editor.
www.servandorocha.com 

28 NOVEMBER
From Spell to Spell, from (Magical) Gesture to Gesture

Ana Contreras invites us to a performative lecture which will uncover the ways in which bonds between feminism and witchcraft have been woven over time, from the medieval period to postmodernism. It will take us on a secret journey through its appearances and persecutions from which we will be able to extract lessons about its dangers and its powers. A witches coven that discloses the importance of occult practices and performative tactics, as well as their conscious and unconscious use in contemporary art.

Ana Contreras is a stage director, researcher and lecturer

Anyone interested in art today. No prior knowledge necessary.

More information at actividades.ca2m@madrid.org / 912 760 227

Curated by Jesús Alcaide, Néstor García Díaz and Víctor Aguado Machuca.

Bogomir Doringer, Chenta Tsai AKA Putochinomaricón, Carles Congost, Ana Laura Aláez, Joan Morey, The Congosound, Magui Dávila, Nayare Soledad Otorongx, Gema Marín Méndez, Manuel Segade, Snap Bitch! X Don’t hit a la negrx (Galaxia, Wat3rmami AKA Donovan Toxic), Espai d’Art Contemporani de Castelló research group (Bartolomé Limón, Rubén Serna and María Sánchez), DIDDCC working group (Andrea Martín, Manuela Muñoz, Clara Neches, Manuel Padín, Natalia de la Piedra and Rita Zamora).

The idea behind the Image Symposium is to provide a space for collective thinking on the theory, practice, semantic openings and contemporary demarcations of visual cultures, taking the form of a forum for debate, a symposium and workshops, and an open call for research projects.

The point of departure for this year’s symposium is the work of a research group at CA2M which has sourced in Manel Clot’s texts a discursive output which has left us, more than anachronisms, reminiscences of the 1990s, like, for instance, underscoring the connections between the concept of club culture and art practice; or inventing and implementing appreciative and operative categories, where none previously existed, for the consideration of new expressive repertoires and new meaningful registers that would become symptomatic of a time and a place. In fact, the title given to this year’s symposium comes from Musée des phrases (2003-2015) by Manel Clot and the image is by Carles Congost, taken in Manel Clot’s studio with the assistance of Daniel Riera; in it one can see a young Fine Art student called Joan Morey.

The symposium is spread over three days with a full programme of conversations, reading sessions, performative lectures and listening sessions, which will help to situate a number of issues concerning club culture but, at once, they will also respond to the demand to expand the field of given representations of subjectivity, of the fluctuation of its value, of the position of desire; of recognizing possibilities of dissidence with regards social distribution or other relationships between the body and temporality.

PROGRAMME:

19 May. Impure Scenifications (1)
12:00–13:30 Research group at Espai d’Art Contemporani de Castelló. Reading session on the exhibition and archive for Hypertronix, by Manel Clot.
16:00–17:00 Magui Dávila: Escribir una session (Writing a Session), DJ session and performative lecture.
17:00–17:30 Manuel Segade: Hacer noche (Making the Night), presentation.
17:30–19:30 Ana Laura Aláez, Joan Morey, Carles Congost and Jesús Alcaide: Un soplo en el corazón (A Heart Murmur), selection of frequencies around Manel Clot.
19:30–20:30 The Congosound, DJ selector.

20 May. Dance this Mess around (2)
12:00–13:30 DIDDCC working group: Party and Protest, expanded reading session.
16:00–16:30 Néstor García Díaz: Dance this Mess Around, presentation.
16:30–18:00 Bogomir Doringer: From I Dance Alone to Dance of Urgency, lecture.
18:00–19:00 Manel Clot: Musée des phrases, video-screening.
19:00–19:30 Gema Marín Méndez: Notas a una/sola voz (Notes in one/single voice), performative lecture.
19:30–20:30 Cute aggression, DJ session.

21 May. Sonic, somatic fictions (3)
12:00–13:30 Shared reading session on More Brilliant that the Sun, by Kodwo Eshun.
16:00–16:30 Víctor Aguado Machuca: “Éxtasis; faktura subjetiva”, presentation.
16:30–17:30 Nayare Soledad Otorongx: Cuerpxs que da pánico soñar (Bodies we don’t dare to imagine), performance.
17:30–19:00 Galaxia, Wat3rmami AKA Donovan Toxic: Snap Bitch! X Don’t hit a la negrx.

INFORMATIVE NOTE:

Prior enrolment is required to attend the symposium. Attendance at individual sessions may be allowed although priority will be given to persons previously enrolled. We would also ask all persons enrolled to please be punctual. Ten minutes after the beginning of the first session of the afternoon, any remaining places will be given to persons who have turned up for the session without previous enrolment.

Bogomir Doringer’s lecture is in English with simultaneous translation. All morning reading sessions will be held in the Aula, and the afternoon activities in SUI. The audience will be invited to take part after each conversation and at the end of each session and each day’s symposium.

Certificates of attendance will be issued to enrolees who attend 80% of the afternoon’s session. The morning sessions are voluntary and free while places last, but will not be taken into account when issuing certificates of attendance.