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Cha-cha-cha at dawn at dawn cha-cha-cha

Cha-cha-cha the backside the backside cha-cha-cha

Cha cha beach hammock idler

Idler hammock beach cha cha

Cha cha apple orange pineapple

Pineapple orange apple cha-cha-cha

Cha-cha-cha square palm trees tra-la-la

Tra-la-la palm trees square cha-cha-cha

Cha-cha-cha boats barbed wire boom-boom-boom

Boom-boom-boom barbed wire boats cha-cha-cha

Cha-cha-cha on the phone on the phone cha-cha-cha

Cha-cha cha-cha word

Word cha-cha-cha

In little more than a decade, the body has moved from the sidelines to a become a focal point of contemporary culture. For this shift to fully unfold its potential, it is necessary to pay attention to the way our materiality articulates with our surroundings. Word cha-cha-cha explores turning points in which bodies are given shape by words, and vice versa, through the paradigm of expanded language. Ambivalently, this language of blurred boundaries both produces and is the result of movement, sound, images, automatisms, feelings, economy and modes of social organisation. This programme proposes a series of performances that bear partial witness to the complexity with which these elements intertwine and affect each other.

Language no longer belongs to humans alone but, in a return to the fable of sorts, animals, objects and natural elements murmur in our ears. On the other hand, the certainty of signifiers fades when confronted with the infinite variability of models and the multiplicity of possible interpretations. In this realm where vagueness reigns, every sentence we utter is a spell, a door we open without knowing where it leads. By questioning the mechanisms for naming and their relationship with things, there is also interference with established dynamics, and possibilities emerge that are beyond the imaginable.

Through choreographies, poems, songs, whispers, shouts, rumours, spells, films without images, the clacking of castanets, familiar languages, obscure languages, unusual translations, incarnated books and newspapers, the language of birds and computers, we may temporarily lose our speech and be forced to search for words. Who knows if we will find different ways of expressing thought to, facing, before, below, fitting, with, against, about, from, since, after, during, in, between, towards, until, for, by, according to, without, under, over, behind, versus, via the silhouette of clouds, the bottom of pockets or the dregs of coffee.

Curated by Quim Pujol

Early 19th-century London witnessed the founding of The Picnic Society, an association that would meet regularly in the open air, at which time each member was expected to provide some of the entertainment and refreshments without there being a specific host. Borrowing this concept from the Picnic Society, the CA2M Museum invites a number of curators each year to design a programme for the Museum’s roof terrace.

Every Thursday from the end of May until the end of June, our roof terrace is turned into a space for hosting a programme of activities that combine body and sound with education and participation. 

PROGRAMME

Thurs 25/05 I Llorenç Barber. ACTUM REENACTMENT. Javi Álvarez.

Thurs 01/06 I Juf (Leticia Ybarra + Bea Ortega Botas), Pol Jiménez, Matthieu Blond.

Thurs 08/06 I Park Keito (Kotomi Nishiwaki + Miquel Casaponsa), Joris Lacoste, Noela Covelo. 

Thurs 15/06 I Paula Miralles, Josep Xortó & The Congosound.

Thurs 22/06 I Alix Eynaudi, Clara Amaral, Simon Asencio.

Thurs 29/06 I María Jerez +Élan d’Orphium, Laura Llaneli, Venecia Flúor.

TIMES: 9–11PM, EXCEPT FOR THE SESSION ON 29/06 WHICH WILL START AT 8:30PM

DOORS OPEN AT: 8:30PM. PLEASE BE ON TIME.

SELF-PUBLISHING TABLES

Thurs 25/05 I CAJA NEGRA

Thurs 01/06 I CANICHE

Thurs 08/06 I LA UÑA ROTA

Thurs 15/06 I CONTINTA ME TIENES

Thurs 22/06 I LIBROS DE ARTISTAS

Thurs 29/06 I VARAMO PRESS

ABOUT THE CURATOR

Combining the performing arts and contemporary art, Quim Pujol’s artistic practice denatures language to reveal the ideology that lies behind ordinary modes of expression and to open up other possibilities of association. The latest pieces by this iconoclastic writer and performance artist are El mensaje de otros mundos (2021) and Variedad de variedades (2022). He has participated in exhibitions at arts centres such as the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, La Capella and the EACC. Together with Ixiar Rozas, he edited the book on affect theory Ejercicios de ocupación (Ediciones Polígrafa, 2015). He curated the experimental programme of the Mercat de les Flors (2011–2015) and collaborates with the Observatorio del Placer.

Acknowledgements: Berta Gutiérrez Casaos.

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.

The third edition of the CA2M Museum Cuttings Exchange will take place on the afternoon of Tuesday, 28 March. It is a time to share knowledge, bring cuttings and barter seedlings to make our homes greener and less boring.

Although the Cuttings Exchange is mainly about indoor plants, you are welcome to bring plants of all kinds to share. Bring the ones you don’t want, and take home the ones you like best. In addition, on this occasion, we will be holding a kokedama workshop so that you can take your new plant home ready to place in its final location.

This Japanese technique for making hanging baskets from organic materials is perfect for small plants and cuttings, such as the ones we’ll be sharing share in the Cuttings Exchange.

Bring your cuttings or unwanted plants in a small pot with soil or in a small cup wrapped in a wet napkin. Exchange them for the ones you like best.

Don’t miss out! Drop in anytime between 6pm and 8pm, and come and learn with us.

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.

Kept in the finest cabinets of the most ostentatious (and pretentious) homes are the most exclusive sets of dinnerware. Such elegant place settings are only brought out on special occasions for use with great refinement to impress the most distinguished guests. Each item is designed and chosen for its function, and each has its own ritual regarding use, and they include dinner plates, soup bowls, soup tureens, gravy boats, salad bowls and platters of various sizes. 

This workshop will provide us with the privilege and enjoyment of working together with the artist Saelia Aparicio to create a unique set of exclusive dinnerware designed by and for the boys and girls of the Móstoles Children’s Home, who have their meals together daily.

The diners will design exclusive pieces, which may be a plate with a secret compartment where broccoli or fish can be hidden without being discovered, a spectacular dish whose contents can be shared with several children at the same time, carving tools with which to create ephemeral works of art with leftover food, a plate with a handle to comfortably carry delicious food from one table to another table, or perhaps a special plate with a barrier to prevent others from stealing chips; who knows? Textiles may be included, such as a refined tablecloth on which to wipe one’s mouth, because, as we know, table manners are very important.

Saelia Aparicio was born on a secret island in 1982 and lives and works in the United Kingdom. Her work is multidisciplinary, with a recent tendency towards functional sculpture guided by her interest in including senses other than sight in her work.

Some of her most recent projects include works for Jerwood Survey 2, in London; Paraiso Extraño at MUSAC, Leon; We Belong to Each Other at Carlier Gebauer, Berlin; Generaciones 2019; and The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish, curated by the Serpentine Gallery, London.