Attendance open and free while places last

This year, after a decade working together in the vegetable garden, we want to focus on experiences that give you the skills and confidence you need to cultivate a vegetable garden on your own. Whether for your private vegetable garden or our collective one on the Museo CA2M roof terrace, we’ll cover everything you need to achieve your goal and carry out a large-scale project with self-assurance. We’ll also run other workshops related to nature and environmental conservation from the perspective of our cities.

Roof Terrace Garden is a space where different generations come together to learn, build and share knowledge for the collective creation of a new urban model based on ecological sustainability and putting the good life into practice. It’s a space for devising a transition to a world that is able to provide a robust response to the major challenges of the twenty-first century.

Xisela Garcia Moure provides training in organic farming, permaculture and specialised techniques for urban vegetable gardens and sustainable food. Plus, she’s a resident of Móstoles.

MODULE 1

Introduction to cultivating an organic garden that produces all year round.

• Friday 7 February – Vegetables all year round

In this workshop we’ll cover the basics for creating an organic garden that produces all year round. We’ll also try to calculate the spaces and plants you need to obtain your entire vegetarian diet in a single place.

• Friday 14 February – Irrigation systems

No vegetable garden in Madrid can survive without an efficient irrigation system to compensate for the lack of rain in the hottest months of the year. What’s the best system for watering your garden?

• Friday 21 February – Green fertilisers and soil fertility

You can't create an organic garden without first examining the soil from which it will grow. What does organic, sustainable cultivation really mean?

• Friday 28 February – The edible forest

The best way to emulate nature’s wisdom is to create a system as similar as possible to the natural ecosystem. Learn how to combine trees, shrubs and vegetables in the same space.

• Friday 7 March – Designing a vegetable garden

It’s time to decide what you want to eat this summer and how you are going to organise your spaces. The design is the key to a healthy vegetable garden.

• 14 March – Spring planting

A garden grows from its seeds. Which are the best seeds for an organic garden? Learn how to prepare seedbeds.

• 21 March – Aromatic plants

No vegetable or regular garden is complete without a space for colourful aromatic plants. Edible or not, they will complement your garden and attract biodiversity.

• 28 March – The ornamental garden

A special workshop for those who enjoy having a green space in their home or garden but don’t want to commit to the work involved in growing vegetables every year. An ornamental garden is also a beautiful way to connect with nature.

MODULE 2

Growing different families of vegetables and getting the system up and running.

• 4 April – Planting bulbs

In this workshop we look at the best way to grow bulbs, whether flowers or root vegetables, to ensure they thrive and you can enjoy their beauty and flavour a few months down the line.

• 11 April – Planting leaf vegetables

Everything you need to know about planting leaf vegetables and other herbaceous plants, from cultivating them to treating the effects of frost, heat waves and pests.

• 25 April – Planting legumes

No organic garden is complete without legumes. These plants not only help to maintain soil fertility but offer a vital source of vegetable protein.

• 9 May – Planting fruit vegetables

The quintessential summer vegetables. Learn about the different varieties of tomatoes, aubergines, peppers... and everything you need to know about growing them in a place like Madrid.

• 16 May – Biodiversity in the vegetable garden

Not all insects are harmful. Some of them will help you to care for your plants if you give them a cosy place to thrive.  Organic treatments for pests and diseases.

• 23 May – Homemade remedies for diseases in the family vegetable garden

Now that you can identify pests in your garden, we’ll give you some ideas for eradicating them. You’ll also learn how to identify other diseases and make remedies to keep your plants healthy.

• 30 May – Out and about!

The best way to learn how to cultivate a garden is to visit similar projects so you can pick up new ideas and tips. (Advance registration is required for this workshop. Get in touch with Reception at CA2M to book your place.)

• 6 June – The organic garden diet I

Organic food isn’t just a fad. It’s a matter of health. But there’s no point going organic if you don't know how to get the full benefit.

• 13 June – The organic garden diet II

We give you more tips and recipe ideas to improve your diet for healthy eating.

• 20 June – Healthy picnic

It’s time to put into practice the recipes and knowledge you’ve acquired and share delicious flavours and dishes at an end-of-term meal.

The first time I entered the hills, Godmother asked me to put my hands on the ground and then bring them to my mouth and kiss them. She told me to go around the kapok tree three times, the guardian of the hills’ eye where she buried her staff, and to look up waiting for signs of permission. As I was looking at the sky, a few drops fell on my face to the beat of a flutter of birds dancing with the prayer that Godmother was whispering, embracing the roots of the mystery.

yenyere guma good evening, good evening

yenyere guma, good evening, how are you?

In this edition of the Picnic Sessions 2024, we’re going to put our hands on the earth, ask for permission, head back to the bush. We’re going to connect with the Ashe, with gestures, myths, rites, wisdom, listening. We’re going to dance resistances and fleetingness, celebrate the differences of this living hill-Caribbean-archive. On the museum’s terrace between 30 May and 4 July, we are going to activate a ceremony in six stages (Rupture, Prayer, Supplication, Trance, Manifestation, Coronation) to break away from ethnographic lenses that burden our bodies, territories, geographies, spiritualities and creations with exoticising, simplifying tales. We’re going to bless ourselves with the Caribbean pica-pica before crossing the sea with the permission of the dead women who replenish it with tears every day, with the license of the blood, chains and Orishas that live there.

We’re going to paint the body with soil and salt; mark each step in the sand while the echoes of the calling drum resonate in the thickness. Check each leaf and each stone as part of the legacy that sustains and narrates us. Look at the sky and talk with the clouds, with the stars, with the sun and the moon, who guide our walking and our singing. Feel the wind that carries our ancestors’ secrets, that whispers stories of freedom and forgotten struggles. Each step in the hills is an act or recovery, an act of memory that challenges the imposed oblivion, that unearths the truths concealed under the weight of history written by others.

Godmother said that there was a tunnel under the tallest caguairán tree on the mountain, which led her directly home whenever she wanted to embrace her Nigerian great-grandmother. Godmother believed in witches and shapeshifters, in güijes —local mythical creatures— and in the two-headed boa that predicted the future on Saint John’s Eve. Godmother flew on a traditional twig broom and was familiar with all the good and bad herbs for remedies. Godmother listened to the owls, the moon and the foolish snakes in the mangrove swamp from her swinging rope over the coloured earth. Every Friday she blessed and cleansed with basil, verbena and red flowers. At some point in the ceremony, she fell into a trance and her body was occupied by the old Sarabanda, who always came singing:

I went to the hills and brought back

something nice for you

something nice for you

something nice for you

José Ramón Hernández (Palma Soriano 1988)

He is a non-disciplinary Afro-Cuban artist who graduated from the Instituto Superior de Arte of Cuba. He is the founder and artistic director of Osikán – Creation Incubator and the Afronteriza Residency of the Centro Cultural Espacio Afro in Madrid. His practice ranges between artistic direction, dramaturgy, choreography, curation, installation, performance, education, mediation and cultural management. He is a spiritualist, babalocha and palero.

His creative investigation focuses on Afro-descendant rituals, performativities, peripheral bodies, materials, spiritualities, memories, migrations, cartographies and desires. He tests the boundaries between fiction and reality, work with non-fictional documents and the tools of the senses to affect and intervene in social and community processes.

He won the Circuito de las Artes Plásticas Award of the Community of Madrid in 2022 with the installation Ojú inú yàrá, the Villanueva Critics’ Award (Unión Nacional de Artistas de Cuba, UNEAC, and International Association of Theatre Critics) and the Aire Frio Award (Asociación de jóvenes escritores y artistas de Cuba) for the 2016 work BaqueStriBois; and first prize at the 2006 La Fiesta de las Relaciones for the work Maferefún pa Antonia.

His works have been shown in Cuba, Mexico, Chile, the Dominican Republic, Canada, Germany, Belgium, the United States, Brazil and Spain.

To mark the occasion of its 15th anniversary, on 4 and 5 May the CA2M Museum is hosting FURIA, a Live Arts Festival whose first edition will bring together traditional flamenco and contemporary performance art.

The CA2M Museum will become a space for the creation and exhibition of the performing arts, mixing popular culture with contemporary art. 

FURIA celebrates the museum’s entry into maturity on its 15th anniversary, without losing any of the youthful strength, boldness and the enthusiasm for which it is known. The museum has invited leading artists to create performance art pieces that will be premiered at this festival.

PROGRAMME

• THURSDAY 4 MAY. 8PM TABLAO. An installation by Ernesto Artillo for the flamenco troupe: Yerai Cortés, Niño de Elche, Andrés Marín and Rocío Molina.
• FRIDAY 5 MAY. 8PM UNO. Claudia Pagès. With Nora Haddad and nara is neus.

Interdependence is at the very groundbase of our most everyday reality. Marina Garcés contends that “you cannot say I without an echo of us”, but it is a singular us—not ‘all of us’ but rather ‘each one of us’. We are increasingly bombarded by the fantasy that it is possible to live in isolation, but, not only that, that this life in isolation is livable. Political discourses, economic dynamics, ways of life, routines, slogans and individualist aspirations hold sway. And even though the lesson that we need each other can be gleaned from the extreme circumstances we have lived through and from everyday reality, the dominant narratives are different.

Coexistence has been smothered by survival.

Interdependence, and its manifold expressions, is the common thread running through these picnic sessions: ranging from our relationship with nature to work relations. The role of the public is crucial to reach the level of euphoria needed to generate the sensation of community, the sense of belonging that I, you and we all look for in a family, a rave or a union.

Interdependence comes about from the undeniable vulnerability that we all share in common. To bring this reality to light, the hierarchical relationship between audience and artists will disappear in the sessions when creators openly reveal their precariousness, endemic to the cultural industry, exposing the hidden underbelly of their life stories, a kind of in bio veritas that speaks of hand-to-mouth jobs and the difficulty if not directly the impossibility of making a living from art. In addition, the bureaucratic, administrative and fiscal demands required to take part in certain cultural spaces are major obstacles for creative practice. To circumvent and shatter them, mutual support is, as always, the most effective instrument at hand.

More than just participating, the audience becomes one with the music and performances, it is invited to reach out and touch each other blindly, to make exchanges on the sidelines of the economy or to take stock of their privilege with regards those who society categorizes as dependents, as if the rest of us were not.

These Picnic Sessions are an invitation to make the most of these bonds, and to create new ones. With euphoria.

Curated by: Nerea Pérez de las Heras and Mar Rojo.

// At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Picnic Society was founded in London and met regularly in the open air. On its outings, which had no specific host as such, the individual members were expected to provide the refreshments and the entertainment. Starting out from the same concept, and forming its own particular Picnic Society, every year CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo invites various curators to design a programme for the art centre’s roof terrace.

Every Thursday from the end of May until mid-July the CA2M roof terrace will be transformed into a space where we will carry out a programme of activities mixing the body and sound with education and participation. //

PROGRAMME

• Thurs 26/05 I IF YOU MOVE, I MOVE Miss Beige, Dembooty

• Thurs 02/06 I OUTSIDE THE NORM Costa Badía, LVL1

• Thurs 09/06 I INTERDEPENDENTS Ana Matey, Maricas: Jovendelaperla & Berenice

• Thurs 16/06 I A SINGLE BODY Ernesto Artillo, Ece Canli

• Thurs 23/06 I NEW PIECES, NEW GAMES Andrea Jiménez, Caliza

• Thurs 30/06 I MELT, MIX, STIR Victória Bemfica, Emily da Silva, Gabriela Clavería and Ikram Bouloum

SCHEDULE: 9:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. (EXCEPT THE SESSION ON THE 30TH, WHICH WILL BEGIN AT 6:00 p.m.).

YOU CAN DOWNLOAD THE PROGRAM HERE