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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.

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