Workshop

During this 20-hour workshop, CA2M keeps on its line of work focusing on education and reflection regarding the educative uses of bodywork and  performance language. Guided by Norberto Llopis, we will reflect on education and art as political practices, intending to trigger new impulses and searches for new forms of imagination not under control yet. The practice will revolve around some concepts: the concept of performative act, the concept of affection and the power one.

 “Performative” act

In practamatic, the philosopher J.L. Austin explains that language is not pure, a mere instrument of symbolic communication used to transfer meanings, therefore, language can be also studied at a “performative” level, being usually an example of act of promising. Promising, not in the sense of a communication of a subjective intension of performing what it is promised, promising is an act in itself, independent even from what it was promised to finally be performed.

This practice invites us to focus on the performative aspect of our proposals. What are we doing?, What does what we are doing?, of course, I would not want falling into dogmatism, since meanings also “perform”.

Affect and power

“By affect I understand affections of the body by which the body's power of acting is increased or diminished, aided or restrained, and at the same time, the ideas of these affections…”

Barush Spinoza, Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order

Much has been said about affection, but it has not always been considered, as the aforesaid, the power or the possibility that this affect aids or restrains. Putting aside the dimension of power (in a broad sense, as restrained power as enabling, discrediting, impellenting), to some extent, the action of work is denied, limiting affections towards contemplative windows where the action goes no further than their contemplative frame.

What does it give? What does it take? What can it get? What does it want? What does it do? No place for innocence, the intensity of affection doesn´t give a certificate of innocence, like it would be like saying “this affection does not affect”. Willing to generate a discussion environment during this workshop, do not take for granted or dogmatize the concepts we start from.

Instruments

By applying different exercises and instruments to analyze and to approach to our practice by means of affection, action and power, as well as to elude mere discursive or narrative dramas: use of maps as a means to apply strategies to affect in a way to restrain other ways; use of objects as a means of materializing or objecting affects, the affects as that simulation that objects perform: and the use or creation of dictionaries that help us to understand the extension of the affects to work with.

It is a Wave, it transports perturbations in space, it will go far, 13 nomadic horsepower, new battery, it has always slept in a garage, tuned to the max, you can choose whether to pass the MOT or head for the hills, any intermediate options are also negotiable, suffice to hear it hum, it just needs a little servicing, its only fault is that it is always going off on a tangent. Ideal for excursions and short spins, getting lost among the crowd and trading cards. It includes an incomplete toolbox and drifter’s maps. Come and see it, no strings attached.

Nilo Gallego is a musician whose performances use sound as their starting point. His work, which always has a playful component, seeks the participation of the audience and interaction with the context and the everyday. He plays the drums, percussion and electronic music.

This new education project consists of thinking about the patios in education centers and possible interventions in them. These leisure spaces can provide the perfect context from which to reflect on the educational experience and the problems inherent to their architecture at present. Over the course of these months, and through a number of sessions, we will look at the needs of various centers, the invisible powers that govern these spaces and the possibility and importance of transforming them.

The artist, Bárbara Fluxá has been developing a multidisciplinary art project that revolves around an analysis of the construction of the territory as a cultural «landscape». This is why the places in which she puts together her works take on such importance as the genesis and very object of both the artistic and theoretical analysis, at the same time.

VISIT AND TALK ON PER/ FORM. HOW TO DO THINGS WITH (OUT) WORDS
Apart from visiting the Per/form exhibition with the teachers, we will also reflect on the concept of performativity in the museum and its ability to generate knowledge. On this occasion, together with the teachers we will analyze the dynamics of performance!, a joint activity with secondary school groups on this exhibition.

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Schools are places where forms of interrelating and identity are produced. At times, the classroom is governed by a set of rules based on a binary vision of gender, sex and sexuality that limit any other possibility of being in the world. School is not only a place for transmitting learning, but also a place where we learn what things should be like, and what can and cannot be done. This reality is based on a homogenising and normalising ideology that underpins the space and relationships. How can teachers intervene to question this experience of normalisation and ensure that the classroom is a place where each individual can express him or herself freely?

Conscious of the difficulty and the importance of working with these issues in schools, this year we wanted to convey what we have learned in the queer workshops with students to this space for teachers, and to generate new forms of learning through practice. With the help of queer pedagogy and certain artistic strategies, we will imagine ways of joint construction of a classroom where diverse subjectivities coexist and where sexual, racial, functional, religious and other forms of difference are not viewed as a problem. Staying clear of any form of essentialism that reproduces exclusion and violence, we will address how queerness shows us that the order we have naturalised is not fixed, that our positions change and can be displaced and are full of possibilities.

Minimum of 4 people per group

Aimed at teachers and people interested in education

La Casa is a large, broad, diverse, complex and elaborate project full of ramifications, formats and works, which Aitana Cordero has been working on for the last three years.
 

La Casa is a quest, a deal, an adventure, a disaster of one’s own making, a practice that refutes that “always is never possible.”
 

The intimacy of touching a space and allowing a space to touch you. The art of demolition, the choreography involved in laying foundations, the movement of the bird building its nest, the consistency of ruins. Destruction as a constructive ritual.

This workshop or encounter proposes corporal training around the notion of building and living in togetherness. We will relate these practices to our experience in the classroom or in educational or learning spaces, taking into account not only the “what”, but also the “how.”

We’ll play with notions such as the physicality of building, the creation of spaces, the inhabitable, home, collaboration, intimacy, tiredness, repetition and cooking.

Touching, smelling, moving, studying, questioning, updating ourselves, we will construct and knock down ideas and spaces, as a practice aimed at being together, as a way to recycle a certain hope and create a new meaning of what could be inhabitable.

We’ll ask ourselves these questions

What alternative spaces could emerge from the confrontation of shared wishes and from the action of building and breaking?
Where will that leave comfort, roots, intimacy, sharing?
What if putting down roots were a three-dimensional activity, also in motion?
What if our fluids were able to put together bricks that will later be walls, rooms, buildings, streets, neighbourhoods, cities, countries, continents, worlds, universes, constellations…?
In this workshop we will walk, sweat, dance, build, destroy, invent corners, hideouts, shells and amulets, we’ll taste, there will be silences, hollows, voids, tiredness and many objects.

Aitana Cordero is choreographer, creator, performer and pedagogue. Since 2000 she has been developing her own projects as pieces, installations, performances, choreographies, events, films, videos, texts, cooking proposals, and “things”, which she has presented in many European, North-American and Asian cities. Since 2001 she combines her research and artworks with an intense teaching activity in private schools and universities. She also creates theatre works and “company and observation” in processes of other choreographers or creators. You can find her many universes here: www.aitanacordero.com
 

In previous years we held performance and education workshops with Los Torreznos, Tania Bruguera, Pere Faura, Itziar Okariz, Norberto Llopis, Nilo Gallego, Dora García, Aimar Pérez Galí and Luz Broto.

Two 2-hour sessions, times to be decided with the group

Minimum of 4 people per group

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To meet up, to write, to speak, to read an extract, a sentence, a word, to keep silent, to get up and go to the blackboard, to dither … to think about school once and once again. Then remember that situation and share it. Search for the crossovers between queer and education. Look at the rules, the ones we put in place, and do the opposite …

This year we wish to continue the meetings with teachers we begun last year in order to continue thinking from a practical viewpoint about new ways of imagining the classroom, school subjects and bodies. To keep altering the order we believe to be natural and immutable. To keep imagining new positions.

Aimed at teachers in nursery, primary, secondary, third-level and non-regulated education.

More information on educacion.ca2m@madrid.org / 912 760 225

From its start, cinema has been known as one of most fascinating educative means, not only for the subjects and issues raised, but for its imaginary creation capacity and for encouraging new habits of active and critical perception. For the purpose of providing an alternative to those audiovisual dominant products, those that reinforce that consumption behavior and few times lead to reflection, CA2M has created this activity.

This educative program consists of a discussed film screening by an educator alongside a cameraless workshop. The program offers many experimental and fiction creations. Following the discussion after the screening, it continues a workshop where students will experience and work directly on the film itself. After the workshop, it will be screened the manipulated celluloid by the students.

This project is embedded in the CA2M audio-visual literacy project which aims to promote attitudes of active perception from an early age. Within this program, the museum space becomes a place for children to discover new references, find new images and talk about new issues other than the usual ones. This workshop comes with a teachers´dossier to work it after in the classroom.

Maximum 30 students per session

PROGRAMMING

Animal Studies, the cat. Guy Sherwin, 1976 -79, 2´ 50´´ 
Vitrail, Olivier Fouchard, 2004, 1´ 10´´ 
El coro, Le choeur, Abbas Kiarostami, 1982, 17’
Flip Film,  Ellen Ugestald, 2005, 1’ 10´´

This workshop is within the scope of the CA2M long-term activities developed for  educational centers, in particular with those schools surrounding CA2M, with the intent to strengthen collaboration ties with diverse educational agents. For a second year, the activity targets third year students from primary education schools closest to CA2M. This time, La Sonidera will lead this project.

In a society with an audiovisual, radio and sound predominance introduced as exploring means that may provide new sensorial and creative new experiences, this workshop proposed to recover the so popular radio-plays from the 60´ to work aspects such as identity, gender or reality construction. Students from Beato Simón de Rojas will practice listening in search of new perception means. They will also invent stories to be performed using their voices and homemade music and sound effects, working with the body and presence. Through these stories, they could imagine different worlds while develop their capacity to question already-formed ideas about the creation of sound spaces.

La Sonidera is an Ángeles Oliva & Toña Medina´s creation, where they both work in the radio creative field. Thought their radio performances (radio-works designed to be performance with the public), they investigate issues like fears, genders or surviving. Their interest in sound experimentation has taken them to bring back the soundman figure, that person in charge of making the sound effects in radio soap operas, giving a home-made atmosphere to stories with any kind of objects. They claim the radio warmth and its capacity to create mental images as unique means to generate reflection spaces.