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The evening we read Delicious Monster, a short story by the Jamaican-born Canadian writer Nalo Hopkinson, we asked the question what does a monster know and what does a monster taste like, and what does it mean to read from knowledge or from taste. We will talk about monsters, birds, demigods, humans, non-humans and plants, like monstera deliciosa which is also known as fruit salad plant, Swiss cheese plant, monster fruit, and balazo, while the Spanish name costilla de Adán compares it with the ribs of Adam. After the session we agreed to exchange cuttings, so that everybody would look after somebody else’s plant at home. This gave rise to gardens and stories. Shortly afterwards we agreed to continue the reading group and fiction. Almost as if we were always dealing with a new cutting, each reading group at CA2M has led to a new experience: from Know Who You’re Dealing With (2014 ̶ 2015) to The Body as Archive (2015 ̶ 2016) and from there to Vaster that Empires and More Slow (2017).

Delicious Monster proposes conversations and readings within the confines of science fiction, terror and fantasy short stories that rethink some of the guises taken by the “monster”, especially those related with women: mermaids, medusas, witches, bearded women, cripples, outcasts... will be the focal point of sessions to think about horror as a landscape of the limits of the known world and to address the monster as a place from which to generate the surprise of the unexpected; to question what does monstrous or horrific mean; to challenge the order that regulates what is natural, normal or strange; to invent other ways of understanding each other. And we will do so through narrations from, among other, Mario Bellatin, Maryse Condé, Edwidge Danticat, Nalo Hopkinson, Ena Lucía Portela, Jean Rhys, Mary Shelley and Samanta Schweblin. Delicious Monster is also an invitation to experiment sensorial and collective ways of reading.

The group is moderated by Tamara Díaz Bringas.

To partake in any session members of the group must have read the texts in advance and attend with a participative attitude.

Enrolment free from 19 September at biblioteca.ca2m@madrid.org

In 2018 we are introducing a publishing project in conjunction with the printers ROMA. Together we wish to think about some of the practices proposed by the art centre’s Department of Education and Activities and to then share them in printed format.

Agua de Borrajas is a Spanish expression meaning something like “it came to nothing” and is used to speak about something that is left over and hard to capitalise. Borraja is the Spanish for borage, an uncommon annual herb that people do not often know about or recognise, and which people do not pick when it grows in public spaces, which means that it keeps growing and can be gathered by anyone who knows and values it. To prepare it for eating you have to carefully remove the fine fluff that covers the leaves and stalks. Borage is a sturdy plant yet highly perishable and has beautiful blue flowers.

Each one of the processes will have its own particular formal characteristics and will have a bearing on, among other things, the means of production of the printing, suggestions for each project, and what receives the best response.

Enrolment at biblioteca.ca2m@madrid.org  

The only requirement to take part is to have read the books before each session, and to attend with a participative disposition. The group will be moderated by Tamara Díaz Bringas

You’re looking at a clock. It has hands, and figures arranged in a circle. The hands move. You can’t tell if they move at the same rate, or if one moves faster than the other. What does 'than' mean?

The crew of the ship Gum –a nickname meaning something like “pet”– is sent to outer space to gather information on unexplored worlds. One of the scientists on board has a special gift, a talent for "wide-range bioempathic receptivity", which allows him to pick up emotions and perceptions from his surroundings. When the group lands on a distant planet on which there seems to be no life forms, they are faced with unexpected events and mysteries in which empathy proves critical. Vaster Than Empires and More Slow by Ursula K. Le Guin will be the starting point for the reading group which will now focus on science fiction.

To give ourselves time, to take time on fiction stories that participants in previous reading groups wanted to share. The first group came together at the end of 2014 with an invitation to Saber con quién se trata (Know Who You are Dealing With) from Bulegoa zenbaki barik, the art and knowledge office located in Bilbao, which proposed a programme of readings on different agreements, contracts and relationships that define our everyday life. The participants in the opening experience played with and transformed the initial programme, and between 2015 and 2016 we opened up a new phase that expanded our desire for collective reading and experimentation. The second group, called El cuerpo como archivo (The Body as Archive) asked itself, among other questions, about the body as a political and cultural archive and technologies –legal, medical, architectural, media– for the production of the body, gender, sexuality.

Although a large part of our reading is based on essays, science fiction has also crossed our paths on numerous occasions. For instance, Albert Meister’s La soi-distant utopie du Centre Beaubourg (1977) argued: "the only way to reject the system is to ignore it, to deny it. Not against it, but beside it, creating a parallel universe, the parallel space-time continuum of science fiction". Or the inspiring political and multi-species history fictions of Donna Haraway that, as she herself as said, have their stem cells in the creators of science fiction.  

In this third season of the reading group scheduled over ten evenings between February and June 2017, we will take our starting point in stories by Ursula K. Le Guin and Octavia Butler, as well as Ted Chiang, Clarice Lispector and Macedonio Fernández. Similarly to previous occasions, our meetings will ultimately be shaped by the affinities and derivations of the group. Without any given destination, we instead propose to collectively gift ourselves the stores we deserve, the time we deserve and perhaps along the way we can also gift ourselves tools for the worlds we wish to inhabit. We might spend three to five sessions on one single story or we could read a different one for each session. In any case, we will strive to stroll leisurely towards the unexpected. And more slow.

In 1979, shortly after the date established by Malcolm McLaren as the beginning of punk, a pioneering essay by Dick Hebdige was published, Subculture. The Meaning of Style. In this text, contemporary to some of the movements he wanted to study, Hebdige adopted the methodology of Cultural Studies, which breaks down the hierarchies that separate High and Low Culture, in order to examine how the Post-World War II subcultures in Great Britain had been born, and to define the strategies they had followed in opposing the established order. Hebdige's outlook partly differed from that other, romanticized and nostalgic one, which some later authors projected on their particular constructions of punk and its antecedents, and took up the notion of conflict as a starting point in his analysis.

It was a case, first of all, of a class conflict, since all these movements - the Teddy Boys, the rockers, the mods, the skinheads and the punks - appeared among English working class youths, who were resisting the limitations imposed on their own class, as was the case, especially, with the elegant mods, or the ideals of the middle class, and as, eventually, was the case with everybody. The development of these groups also involved a racial conflict, since they were formed by white people, and were opposed to the subcultures developed in those years among the Afro-British population (even though the later would sometimes be their very base), as was manifested in the confusing relationship between the first wave of punk and the Rastafari movement in the West Indies. Nevertheless, Hebdige ignored another conflict - that of gender - which would reveal itself later, with the texts of Angela McRobbie, who would ask herself about the role played by women in the development of subcultures, the riot grrrls, and the re-appropriation by homosexual collectives of some of the resources used by punk.

In the search for a genealogy of these subcultures, Hebdige traces out links between these groups that would break away from the norm and the avant-garde of the late nineteenth century and the beginnings of the twentieth century, based on the importance of style for them, as something significant, and the consequences that this had in how they used objects, decontextualizing them and turning them into symbols of dissidence. These tactics used by subcultures lead him to work on the notion of bricolage, which, generalized and simplified, could be extended to the use of assemblage, collage, and DIY by punks and other subcultural groups.

In this selection of recent books, magazines, and fanzines, self-published, or released, in their majority, by independent publishers, we have assumed some of the aspects mentioned in Hebdige's essay. On the one hand, we have tried to trace out a history, brief and incomplete as any other, of the subcultures that came before punk, or that appeared at the same time, taking up as a departure point the figure of the dandy, and pointing out its links to the historical avant-garde. On the other hand, we have included editions that revise the publications of the punk movement, and some of its most relevant figures. We have also attempted to show how some current artists contemplate this movement, and what followed it, what has been termed post-punk. He haven't included only nostalgic projects, something we know is over and can never be recuperated, but we have also looked for other publications, that analyze punk with anthropological detachment, or question it from a feminist and queer vantage point.

Sergio Rubira is a Lecturer in History of Art at Madrid's Complutense University, and Academic Secretary of the Máster in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture, UAM, UCM, and Museo Reina Sofía. He is an editor at EXIT magazine, and a contributor to El Cultural de El Mundo.

Free entrance.

The strategy might be homespun but the consequences can be industrial. Go into McDonalds. Buy two cheeseburgers. Take the meat from one of the burgers and put it in the other … Voilà! You have a Double Cheese at the economic price of two cheeseburgers. And as a leftover extra, you have a bun to be filled with whatever you want!  
 
PLAY
Beneath the thrown-together, amateur look of the Tuplajuustovinkki tutorial lies a finely spun subversive potential. Showing us how to turn two simple hamburgers into a double, the maker of this video uploaded onto Youtube four years ago, “deconstructs” hamburgers and remakes them in his own way, to suit his personal whim and his wallet. He dismantles and toys with the multinational’s commercial philosophy, imagining a shared form of resistance. While, to begin with, the consumer is controlled by the system, he can emancipate himself through his desire to test and to play, but also through his affirmation as a producer and transmitter of unusual contents. He becomes an unexpected agent of knowledge, aware that knowledge is a realm of invention in which “play” is much more that hitting the play button, but an approximation to the creative space of performance by instructions. Nevertheless, here play can be perverse: To what extent is the tutorial able to question the capitalist machinery of the production of desire? Does it not operate unwittingly as a hymn to the commodity and a productive system that it wanted to attack? Who eats who: us or the hamburgers? In short, the FAQ of a world in which capital is not just the title of a book.

VIEW
Watching others do things that make us believe that we too can do them; we look and learn. In addition, everything looks easy, possible and reproducible in the world of tutorials. As a genre in itself, the tutorial can take the form of videos, manuals, guides, diagrams and leaflets that are distributed in online and offline networks. Often lending more emphasis to images, they require a discursive capacity by association and invite the elaboration of a narrative by intuition. For instance, Tuplajuustovinkki operates under a clearly visual pedagogy. The viewer can easily identify the goal, method and causal relations, even if he or she does not understand a word of Finnish. The interpretation is structured around successive suppositions that are then confirmed, enabling even the inevitable misunderstandings to yield fortuitous discoveries and inventions. The video-tutorials are based on an ability to speak simply about something complex. But, as we all know, speaking simply is never easy, and perhaps that is precisely the source of its popularity, as can be readily seen in the number of views registered below it. As eminently visual materials, video-tutorials stake out a privileged space where theory, and not just visual narrative, is a question of editing. And here, the usual and sometimes mocking expression of “do you want me to draw it for you?” is no longer poking fun but the complete opposite: a serious educational tool.

SHARE
With their tricks, strategies and recipes, tutorials paradoxically make incursions into two opposing realms. On one hand, they are a format proper to structured forms of knowledge that foster a sense of normativity of rules; on the other hand, they are easily parasited by informal knowledge, creating an ideal terrain for experimental and speculative practice, a place where knowledge is formed, communicated and distributed on the sidelines of official institutions. The uncontrolled circulation of these materials, that seem to be governed by a logic of abundance, leads to multiplication, association and contamination of knowledge, fostering a hybrid field of learning that, at once, encourages the appearance of new ideas to be spread. The supremacy of authorship is questioned and, as a consequence, it becomes a point of intervention, taken over by new communities of knowledge and by their collective productions. Open to comments, whether appreciative or not, to be edited or simply photocopied, they feed off their very own call for participation. As open codes, they demonstrate a sufficiently cheeky flexibility to worm their way into even the most orthodox circuits. Under the logos of multinationals that sell happiness in the form of videos or sandwiches, they perhaps introduce a lingering, niggling doubt: Who do the ideas actually belong to?

Though we are constantly assured that “everything is written in books”, others would say that “if it exists, you’ll find it in internet”. Keeping an open mind about these commonplaces but trusting in the “popular” as a mechanism of making worlds, the exhibition Tutorial: Who Teaches What to Who? wishes to offer a platform for dialogue between the selection of publications presented here in various formats and methodologies of transmitting knowledge. Exploring disparate associations between elements of visual culture, publishing, literature, science and contemporary art, the material on display proposes an overview of the cultural memory of know-how and rethinks the ways of generating, diffusing and imagining new politics of collective learning.

Divided into three categories borrowed from internet parlance – PLAY, SHARE and VIEW – the publication rereads these imperative verbs as an invitation, as instructions and directions for a performance as visitor. (Suggestion: in this shared game, it is equally desirable to visualise tactics for dismantling these same categories. The manual can be rewritten and here coincidence plays a key role).

INDISCIPLINADAS: Based in Madrid and in Cali since 2013, the Indisciplinadas collective develops curatorial, editorial and educational projects that experiment with methods of engaging with the context of Contemporary Art and Visual Culture through practices that lend themselves to cross-contamination, recombination and the diffusion of various codes and forms of knowledge. Its interest in the field of publishing is reflected in the “Cuadernos domésticos” project, in the ”Soft [cover] revolution” exhibition and in pedagogical programmes such as “No Room for Books”. It has also collaborated with institutions such as Museo de Arte de Castilla y León (MUSAC), Instituto Europeo de Diseño (IED-Madrid), Biblioteca de las Conchas at the University of Salamanca and Lugar a Dudas in Cali.
 

TUESDAY— FRIDAY. 11:00 — 14:00 & 16:00 — 21:00
Holdings can be consulted freely in the library
http://otraspublicaciones.tumblr.com
www.indisciplinadas.com

Artists in Residence is a joint program by CA2M and La Casa Encendida. Its goal is to support creation by dance artists and other artists working with their body. The program offers artists spaces to experiment, to think and to present their proposals.

Acento is a program linked with a Artists in Residence. Projects carried out during 2013 stays will be resented and a meeting space with 2014 artists will be created. Both institutions want to stress the reflection resulting from artistic production that happens through the body. Body is hereby understood as social body, as a political construction that that transforms sensitivity into knowledge.

Artisits selected in 2013 were: Elisa Arteta,  Cristina Blanco, Pablo Esbert, Carmen Fumero, Martín Llavaneras, Cecilia Lisa Eliceche, Elpida Orfanidou and Juan Perno,  Ángela Peris, Jesús Rubio Gamo and Navidad Santiago.

Admission free while seats are available.

PROGRAMMING

THU 13 FEB IN LCE

20.30h. Building Ropes, by Carmen Fumero

This is a journey made with sensations. Two people relate with each other using intuition represented by their hands, able to express desire and impulse. Sometimes they feel a spontaneous and intuitive need to follow the same direction; sometimes guiding is their objective, and some others they let themselves go. The hands answer the need to recover that emotion. As a result, a past sensation.

Carmen Fumero has carried out several solo projects, among which a work from 2011, with the support of Laura Kumin and Daniel Abreu stands out. In 2010 she received a residence grant in Teatros del Canal through Madrid Choreographic Contest, and that is when she creates her first big format work, Irony, which opened at Teatro Pradilo in 2011. In 2013 she received two choreographic residences, one in Teatros del Canal and another one in La Casa Encendida.

http://carmenfumero.blogspot.com.es/

21.30h. SuperFicials, by Navidad Santiago

This work is a reflection on matter’s communication capacity, starting from elemental particles until reaching human behavior. Because behind modern science, behind fractures and unions, behind love and unease, behind social change, poetry and fiction, our behavior patterns convey the conduct of the most essential matter, of the most superficial matters.

Navidad Santiago (Madrid, 1975) holds a Sociology degree by the UCM. Madrid; a post-graduate degree in Political History by Palachejo University. Olomouc. Chec Republic, and a degree in Classical Dance by África Guzmán, SCAENA, Madrid Dance Center.

FRI 14 FEB IN CA2M

19.00 h. Elpid’arc, by Elpida Orfanidou and by Juan Perno

Elpida Orfanidou and Juan Perno decide to plunge into an impossible adventure: to copy and recreate one of the most important works of the history of cinema, the silent movie La passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928) directed by C.Th.Dreyer and featuring María Falconetti as main actress. Elpid’arc is a film-performance where cinema and theatre become an alchemical solution. The unexpected encounter between mysticism, everyday life and sense of humor makes this work fascinating.

Elpida Orfanidou (Greece, 1981) is a Greek choreographer and performer; she studied dance and performance in Athens, Arnhem, Montpellier and London. She has created several solo projects that were gathered in “One is almost never”. She has worked with Herman Heisig (United States) and Juan Perno ( Elpid’arc). As a performer she has worked with Gui garrido, Tim Etchells, Mahela Rostek and Meg Stuart among others.

Juan Perno (Madrid, 1980) holds a degree in Philosophy (UAM Madrid) and a PhD in Aesthetic, Photography and Audiovisual Communication (Fine Arts College. Universidad Politécnica of Valencia). He has been a teacher of real and live cinema and video in several centers. He worked as a creative director of digital advertisement in Italy for four years. At the time he works in projects mainly focused on appropriation in different fields such as video, photography and theatre. Elpid'arc is his last work. It’s a co-production between HAU Theatre Berlin and the Onassis Foundation in Athens, together with La Casa Encendida and CA2M.

http://www.juanperno.com/

http://vimeo.com/elpidaorfanidou

20.30h. Vortex agitator, by Cristina Blanco

Vórtex agitator is Cristina Blanco’s brand new project. Starting with the wish to work with different genres (cinema, opera, theatre, musical, etcetera…) the artist researches on each genre’s conventions in order to question their rules and to surprisingly combine them. A live collage of genres that talk to each other and break their own codes, questioning their own nature and playing at changing the rules. Why do we associate a symphonic orchestra playing dissonant music with a scary movie? What happens if the credits at the end of a James Bond movie have a background of traditional bagpipe Galician music? How do E.T. and a bishop live together in the Far West? What about a Sevillana dancer and a ninja fighter in a spaceship?

After getting a degree in Mime Theatre by RESAD, Cristina Blanco works as an actress in several theatre companies. She gets interested in dance and follows a few workshops, plays different roles in a few short films and sings in a few bands. In 2004 she creates her first solo project: cUADRADO_fLECHA_pERSONA qUE cORRE (square, arrow, person who runs). In 2006, she creates caixa preta_caja negra together with Brazilian choreographer Claudia Müller. In 2008 she opens The Nevestarting Story, a project by Cuqui Jerez, María Jerez, Amaia Urra and Cristina Blanco. In October 2009 she opens The Croquis Reloaded in Madrid, a work by Cuqui Jerez with Cristina Blanco. In September 2010 she features TELETRANSPORTATION installation/piece created for Mapa festival, and in October she opens ciencia_ficción (science-fiction), a solo chat-process-blog-concert.

http://www.tea-tron.com/cristinablanco/blog/

SAT 15 FEB IN LCE

17.30h. Impermanence, by Elisa Arteta

The artist proposes a corporeal, visual and sound experience that refers to constant change and no-return. The artist’s movements are limited in this situation and she needs to adapt her body to a new habitat. When time passes by, a well-defined trail is left behind which becomes the memory of what happened there. Meanwhile the audience can freely walk around the installation and choose the duration of their experience.

Elisa Arteta is a dancer in the broad sense of the term. Her work shows many layers and interests, ranging from video camera use, to proprioception study or the search of ways to integrate different themes on stage. At the moment she questions the intentions of a body that is displayed on stage and the meaning of the concept of choreography itself. She always looks for very different contexts to present her work. http://elisaarteta.com/

18.30h. Sound-sensing the space, by Ángela Peris Alcantud

This work is about inventing a new sound reality. This reality exists and it’s right here, around us. In order for this world to come into light, it needs to be vibrated, told, noted down, whispered, broken down, played and displayed. The idea of sound-sensing results from the need of creating movement through sound. Our own imagination or an external factor (all the sounds around us) could be creating this sound. In both cases and both through the internal and the external sound, sentences are created with the body and the voice that finally become a rhythmic score, a piece of sound and movement. Sound-sensing means to experience sound islands that together make a noisy and invented archipelago.

Ángela Peris Alcantud holds a degree and a master in Audiovisual Communication; she studied choreography and dance in Martha Graham School and Dance Space Center (now DNA), New York; in SNDO, School for New Dance Development, Holland, and in Institut del Teatre, Barcelona. Her work is a quest for a meeting point between movement, voice and thought. Together with artist Alma Söderberg, in 2012 she created ALLES, a piece designed for children. Also, since 2011 she works as a collaborating artist in Yehudi Menuhin Foundation in Spain, as part of the Mus-e program, art for coexistence. http://angelaperis.blogspot.com.es/

20.00h. The rape of Europa (2013 - ad infinitum), by Jesús Rubio Gamo.

Searching for a subjective-collective non-historical memory

Jesús Rubio Gamo aims at creating a meeting point in Madrid city with the goal of building a collective memory that is both subjective and emotional. A "memorial emotional and dramatic monument" would be created to be shared with others through samples of this very monument and additional activities (such as round tables and debates) revolving around this process.

Jesús Rubio Gamo (Madrid, 1982) holds a Master in Performing Arts and Visual Culture by Alcalá de Henares University and Reina Sofía National Museum, 2011-2012. He is a play-wright. Co-author of texts presented by the Sala Cuarta Pared, Madrid, in 2010 "White Night" event; guest choreographer, Spanish representative in Das 6 Tagen Rennen International Festival. Creation of a piece with residence in Pact-Zollverein, Essen. Shows in Madrid, Lucerne and Essen. German-Spanish-Swiss co-production, 2010.

http://www.jesusrubiogamo.com/

21.30h. Going nowhere together, by Pablo Esbert

Going nowhere together is performance that seems to be a concert, a ritual that seems to be a ballet solo, and a collective experience that seems to be a show. During two months I have invited other artists, friends, relatives and strangers to spend a day with me; a day to share physical and sound practice, to reflect and discover together going nowhere.
http://goingnowheretogether.wordpress.com/

Pablo Esbert Lilienfeld creates his own theatre and audiovisual works since 2005. He closely works with Alessandro Sciarroni and with other European choreographers. At the same time, he works as a musician and video-creator. He studied Audiovisual Communcation in Universidad Complutense, Contemporary Dance in RCPD and music in the Creative Music School.
www.pabloesbertlilienfeld.com