912760227

DIRECTED BY SELINA BLASCO

We are now setting out on another new course with this question, introduced a long time ago with the advent of modernism. Surprisingly, in our hyper-consumerist society, it is still as valid and seemingly unexhausted as ever. We use it as a weapon and as a shield, and also as a refuge. We manipulate it and manhandle it. Sometimes, the question has been asked from an incredulous pose (after all, one has to admit that, for whoever actually asks such a question, the answer is no), but never one of suspicion. We believe in art and especially in the enigma it hides. That is why the answer does not have to be yes, nor do we necessarily wish to convince anybody of anything. The answer is that there is no answer or, perhaps, that we don’t know what it is, that we have no idea.

And so, we are stuck with the question, and in this year’s course we will give it another turn of the screw. Instead of pretending that there is a certain type of art which we accept that is difficult to define as such, what if we were to undermine all the certainties with which we have treated art as we have known it? Presupposing a brand of art that requires explanation means establishing a division between a person who doubts and a person who has the answers. But we are going to take a less categorical approach. We will rethink the practices associated with accepted disciplines (drawing, painting, sculpture, musical sounds or design), with supports, places of exhibitions and audiences that seem natural but, let’s be clear, doing so from the here and now. And with renewed urgency. What intrigues us is what is supposedly self-evident.

This course has no title but it could be something related with the desire to fold the tasks of art. The art of folding: a course in origami.

CA2M organises educational activities on contemporary art and thinking that can be framed within the tradition of community colleges, aimed particularly at young and adult students. The courses it offers address some of the key issues for a proper understanding and interpretation of art today, to use it to think. These activities can be divided into two parts: the first consists of the presentation of a theme by a guest speaker and the second part involves a debate open to the audience. The sessions at CA2M are complemented with individual work by the persons enrolled in the course with texts handed out before the beginning of each session.

14 FEBRUARY
Painting is Mysterious
Selina Blasco

Following Ángel González García’s observation that it is best to paint without having an idea, we ask ourselves: How should we engage with painting? In this session we will try to do so from this idea of not knowing, but situating it elsewhere, in the ignorance of someone who does nothing, who paints nothings. We will ask people who paint, in order to see what it is that we can find out. We already have one answer, and we like it so much that we have chosen it as the title of the session. It bodes well. We are also going to work out some way of building a narration of this exercise in experimentation on the ground, in fieldwork. Painting wants to be engaged with Selina Blasco is a lecturer in History of Art at the School of Fine Art, Universidad Complutense de Madrid.

21 FEBRUARY
Contemporary Visual Culture and Drawing. An approach from art practice
Azucena Vieites

Azucena Vieites focuses her practice on graphic processes and techniques of expression, engaging with contemporary visual culture through drawing and silkscreen printing. Multiplicity, fragments and repetition inasmuch as a form of breaking away from the absolute image and linear forms of narration or the ephemeral nature of the artwork are brought to the surface as basic aspects of her production. Taking a few examples from her practice and other works by various artists exploring similar lines of investigation, in this session we will reflect on drawing as a form of representation and insight into our surrounding environs at a specific moment in time.

At the same time, the examples used will be interrelated with some of the issues posed by the German filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger; in each one of her films this artist works with the intention of finding a suitable form that has to do with colours, with time, with dramatic structure and with the way of combining the images.

Azucena Vieites is an artist and teacher at the Schools of Fine Art of Madrid and of Salamanca. Among her most noteworthy solo shows are Woollen Body, Carreras Múgica (Bilbao, 2015) and Tableau Vivant, Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid, 2013).

28 FEBRUARY
An Amateur Carpenter
Carlos Granados

I like to think ideas and to do things. To move from the mind to the hand. And from the hand to the mind. From conceptual artist to carpenter. Have art and carpentry anything to do with each other? Duchamp said that you should only travel with a tooth brush, without any baggage. When I studied art, my referents were those kinds of artists, people who worked with ideas. Now I am working with the plane my grandfather used and it makes me think of his job. Suddenly I see myself accumulating, working with wood, making things. I like projects that take a long time. My friend Ángel always says: “Measure twice. Cut once”. I think that sums up a carpenter’s work very well. A painstaking, patient and slow trade. And a job well done.

Carlos Granados is one of the heads of CA2M’s Department of Education.
 

7 MARCH
Silenced Histories, Forgotten Sounds
José Luis Espejo and Andrea Zarza

How do people position themselves in the public space with sound? This question is a pretext to address narratives focused on the work of blacksmiths, bells and sirens, noise barrages, protest rallies, carnivals and rituals that, if they are not different, at least they are parallel to those that structure the history of music and art. Sound, noise, the murmur of an enraged community and the reverberations of work are quasi-archaeological storylines dissenting with those of official historiography. Charivaria, an exhibition curated by José Luis Espejo and Andrea Zarza at CentroCentro Cibeles between October 2017 and January 2018, showcases a series of works that address these learnings, very often handed down orally or by allegories, which have been minimised by academic disciplines. Artists like Grupal Crew Collective, who take the sounds from parties by collectives without a consecrated identity, or Cuidadoras de Sonidos, Rafael SMP and Vivian Caccuri, who give voice to the inhabitants of neighbourhoods destroyed by the advance of modernism, and Xabier Erkizia, whose work with the culture of ox-carts attunes the hearing to a sound displaced by the hegemony of the urban, are all convinced that their works expand our conception of art. Archives, sounds and writings enable us to recover silenced histories and forgotten sounds in order to rethink genealogies of sound art and music. A display of enigmatic contents surprises the visitors and rarefies the gallery space.

Andrea Zarza is an archivist with a BA in Philosophy. She works as a curator in the British Library sound archive. Her record label, Mana Records, which she runs together with Matthew Kent, is dedicated to publishing works on the intersection between contemporary sound and the archive.

José Luis Espejo is a member of the team at Radio Reina Sofía, Mediateletipos and the Master in Music Industry and Sound Studies at Universidad Carlos III in Madrid. He has developed curated projects in Madrid and in Donostia-San Sebastián 2016.
 

14 MARCH
A Call to Sensuality
Elena Alonso

Defending the value of crafts and the fight to prevent them from disappearing is nothing new. In the early twentieth century, artisan practices were viewed as a revolutionary strategy against industrialisation and capitalism, taking a stance against the unstoppable dehumanisation of work and production. By assigning it qualities such as resistance, skill, authenticity, goodness and self-determination, more than one century ago, the idea was to try to slow down the disappearance of making things by hands due to mass production.

Today, with the digital revolution and late-capitalism, we are witnessing a warped revival of these desires and problems. The conflict leads to a call for sensuality which means that crafts are once again referred to as an exploration of “embodied” relationships, materiality, affect, ecology, localism and sentient intelligence. But there are many questions waiting to be answered... Is there anything contemporary about artisan practices? What is their place within the present system? What is their meaning in terms of resistance? What is the life drive that makes us cling to them?

This session will look at examples of contemporary artists and designers whose working processes are closely related with crafts, focusing on the material quality of objects and the affective nature of their production. An approach to Art and Design to think about the meaning of crafts today, the anachronistic or inevitable nature of these practices, and the art market as the realm in which to keep them alive. All these issues could equally respond to the question: Why do artists keep painting and drawing?

Elena Alonso works mainly with drawing, combining it with other disciplines like architecture, crafts and design, paying special attention to affective relationships with the surrounding environs. She has recently had a solo show at Matadero Madrid, Museo ABC and Espacio Valverde.
 

21 MARCH
Do it to yourself and do it to others
Javier Pérez Iglesias and Marta van Tartwijk

Self-publishing has given a voice to many people who felt that they had something to say outside the usual channels. Which explains why there is such a tradition in the use of fanzines among the queer, anarchist, feminist and other communities.
Artists discovered a long time ago that a book could be an artwork and since then we have arrived at an increasingly varied range of publications.

There is a meeting between self-publishing (or alternative publishing) and artistic intentionality that oversteps the boundaries of the conventional book which is the paradigm of libraries and bookshops.

We act in the libraries of two very institutional institutions, the museum and the academy, but endeavouring to boost their porosity, to explore their cracks and to connect with what happens on the street.

Books are not what they used to be… And the same goes for libraries.
Javier Pérez Iglesias is a biblioactivist, talkperformer, reading curator, bad cataloguer and worse classifier
Marta van Tartwijk is, among other things, a part-time artist, vocational librarian, photocopying self-publisher, bibliographic maze engineer, fanzine disorderer and catalyst for literary afternoons.
 

4 APRIL
Sculpture in the Making
June Crespo

This session is conceived to think about the various aspects proper to sculpture, looking at works that engage with sculpture from different media. I am interested in a kind of sculpture in the making, the negotiation between subject and object that takes place during the process, and  what the first contact with it is like. To approach it, walk around it, move away and keep within its magnetic field. From its surface to its body, outline and image.

How does it affect me? What physical resonance does it have in me? From where does it look at me? What movement and choreographies does it instigate? How does it activate the space?
June Crespo lives in Bilbao, where she graduated with a BA in Fine Arts in 2005. She also works and exhibits in other international contexts, focusing her practice on sculpture.
 

11 APRIL
Here there is no place from where we cannot be seen
Rafael Sánchez-Mateos Paniagua

The Prado Museum: the reserve of knowledgeable scholars, of flocks of tourists disappointed at not being able to take selfies with Velázquez, and children who have to be explained that we are the ignorant subjects of high culture. Lost, overpowered or even a little underwhelmed by the artworks of yesteryear and their saints, kings and virgins which makes it difficult to find a people you would want to identify with. One might imagine that everything has already been said, clarified, catalogued and fallen into decline, after having lavished such privileged attention that today could not be anything but anachronistically and complacently legitimising of the context where they have ended up. Despite the artworks, to the extent in which they continue to be accessible to experience, they are radically contemporary with whom they find themselves. They offer themselves to the senses so that each individual can recognise, reflect and refract a new non-prescribed sense. They might even hope to adopt new lives, driven by the memory and imagination they are still capable of exciting in us. Always open to the unforeseen—-individual or collective—experience that is still possible to have, despite all the sacralising context of the museum institution and its security guards, both inside and outside. The important thing is to try to intensify, revitalise and reorganise the space of attention, aisthesis and perception—so overlooked in its material form and so threatened by the modernisation we have undertaken—with the purpose of renewing the experience of art today which is as strange as it is succulent, from the generosity of those who approach something strange and (re)discover themselves when being observed by the very work they contemplate.

Rafael Sánchez-Mateos Paniagua is an artist, teacher and researcher.

More information on actividades.ca2m@madrid.org / (+34) 912 760 227

In recent years the Universidad Popular explored illusionism and magic. With this idea in mind, we are now proposing to follow up our research and take it to the limit, to the fabulous. This year we will work with the idea of the chimera, understood as improbable illusion and also as an impossible being made from different bodies. We have conjured up bodies that multiply, that question the idea of the human and the artist, mixing science and art, like the Quimera Rosa collective; or those that safeguard the chimerical fire, like Fermín Jiménez Landa. We invite anyone interested in thinking about these unexplored ideas and in feeding the monster.

This year we will also be featuring a series of publications which will be available for browsing and consultation in the CA2M library. In addition, just before each session, participants are invited to take part in a shared reading of a book chosen for the occasion.

CA2M organises educational activities on contemporary art and thinking that can be framed within the tradition of community colleges. The courses it offers address some of the key issues for a proper understanding and interpretation of art today. These activities can be divided into two parts: the first consists of the presentation of a theme by a guest speaker and the second part involves a debate open to the audience. But this structure can also change to adapt to more experimental formats depending on the guest at each session.

SESSIONS
 

30 OCTOBER
Quimera Rosa | Trans*Plant: a journey through the chimerical looking glass
 

"We are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism;
in short, we are cyborgs."
Donna Haraway, Cyborg Manifesto
 

The material and products for cultivating new symbiotic beings are prepared in a bio-hacklab. While the preparations are taking place, the chimeras take the public on what they call the OncoMouseTM journey, by means of a live commented AV presentation. OncoMouseTM is the first animal created in a lab and then patented. The first cyborg, the first laboratory chimera.

You are invited to a performative and participative bio-art lecture. This commented journey is based on three years of biomedical research in an artistic-scientific setting, on the ethical issues we came across and our investment in self-experimentation, trans-disciplinary approaches and the trans-feminist gaze in art practices.

_ Quimera Rosa is an art collective exploring the body, technology and identity.
 

6 NOVEMBER
Fermín Jiménez Landa | Save from the Fire
 

- What work of art would you save if there was a fire in the Prado Museum?
- The fire
(Response attributed to Jean Cocteau)
 

In this lecture on fire we will talk about a year of local euphoria, carpentry, security guards, falleras mayores, hearths and homes, bonfires and wildfires, Airbnb and afters, rituals of purification and ashes. A commission the artist received to create a falla for the official programme of Valencia’s annual festival was dispersed in infinite parts interrelating folklore, night-time, conceptual art and quick fixes. Humans lit bonfires to cook food and to keep themselves warm but they soon discovered that it also prolonged the light of day, ignoring the rhythm marked by the turning of the planet, altering circadian cycles and creating a perfect time for fables, tall tales and stories.

_ Fermín Jiménez Landa is an artist.
 

13 NOVEMBER
Moon Ribas | The Seismic Sense
 

In this lecture Moon Ribas will talk about the possibilities of hybridising bodies and technology and how these bodies act within art. Moon Ribas will speak about the creation of a seismic sensor and how it allows her to perceive earthquakes anywhere in the world through vibrations in real time. With the purpose of sharing this experience, Ribas translates her new seismic sense to the stage, transposing earthquakes into sounds in Seismic Percussion or into dance in Waiting For Earthquakes.

_ Moon Ribas is a contemporary artist.
 

20 NOVEMBER
Pablo Esbert y Federico Vladimir | How to Engender Your Own Dragon
 

Pablo and Federico give a lecture-concert on dragons and other collectively created creatures. Using speculative fiction as a tool and their own work as artists, they address questions on trans-individuality, the post-human, automation and non-traditional forms of narrating ourselves.

The dragon is a fictional creature that appears in the imaginary of many different societies throughout the course of history. It is a hybrid being that interlaces nature and culture, a cocktail of earthly and fantasy animals. The dragon lives in a fantastic narration in which diverse subjectivities can coexist and interrelate without the usual prejudices underwriting realist narrations. It is a monster that helps us to be critical and creative, to imagine challenging representations of “us”. It is also a fiction in which, similarly to contemporary practice, different artistic disciplines coexist, like a trans-disciplinary hydra with many heads.

The dragon is a creature made up of various individuals whose monstrosity prevents it from being too balanced, too organic or too polished. A being of beings in continuous transformation which aspires to the impossible: to devour its spectators in order to incorporate them.

_ Federico Vladimir Strate Pezdirc and Pablo Esbert Lilienfeld are artists.
 

27 NOVEMBER
Marc Sempere | From Art to Ritual
 

For several years now the artist Marc Sempere Moya has been examining the limits between the individual and the collective. Here he is proposing a circular performative lecture in which we can explore the possibilities of rituals today in both theory and practice.

We will discover some of his works, his recent theoretical investigations and his performative projects.

We live in a world in which rituals barely exist anymore, and in which everything is pure representation. Is there any possibility of recovering a world that lives in common? Of recovering a "relational identity"? Of living in a chimera?

_ Marc Sempere Sempere is a multifaceted artist who works, researches and popularises relationships between the oral tradition and free culture through music, performance, theatre, film... and paellas!

//////
 

Anyone interested in art today.
 

No prior knowledge necessary.
 

More information: 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.

A sustainable city is based not just on individual good practices but also on collective projects that give shape to a large mass of people conscious of the needs of this new era. It is important to re-establish community bonds, to find points in common and to recover the social weave that had characterized Móstoles for so many years and which had led to so many big achievements for its people. With this purpose in mind, CA2M’s Community Sustainability Laboratory has programmed a special day for exchanging cuttings and indoor plants. A place where local citizens can meet up, exchange know-how and barter.

Bring along any cuttings or plants you no longer want, in a small pot with earth, or in a container wrapped in damp tissue. Exchange them for other ones you want.

Wednesday 23 March. Drop by any time between 4:30 to 8:30 pm.

See instructions below on how to make cuttings.

We look forward to seeing you!