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Raising our own flag on the museum’s façade for one minute. Inventing colour palettes that we’ll use to build the landscape of Móstoles precisely at thirty minutes past noon. Bringing our bodies together close, really, really close, until we become a huge rock. Doing meditation exercises on the building’s rooftop or imagining the sunset-tinged evening sky.

These are just a few of the experiences that the students who visited the museum had. During the school year, we offer activities designed for groups of secondary and baccalaureate students that revolve around the exhibitions and seek to generate meaningful experiences. Our project aims to forge a direct tie between contemporary artistic practices and students with the goal of revitalising and bringing new life to the museum’s spaces. To do so, we approach the exhibitions as spaces of creation and collective inquiry.

This time, we’ll work with the exhibitions of Santiago Sierra and Sol Calero. Exploring these two shows will enable us to connect with topics like identity, migration, power and exclusion. This experience seeks to not only expand students’ understanding of contemporary social and cultural issues but also generate spaces for critical thinking. It is an encounter designed with the desire to share knowledge, practices and experiences and to debate the content of the exhibitions with the students.

With this approach in mind, we have invited the artist Marta van Tartwijk to work with us to come up with and design strategies to activate the exhibition spaces.

Marta van Tartwijk (Barcelona, 1990) has a degree in Fine Arts from the Complutense University of Madrid and furthered her training at the École Superieur d’Art de Bretagne (France), the University of Barcelona and A*Desk. She has exhibited and developed her work in different institutions like Fabra i Coats, INJUVE, Sala de Arte Joven, TEA Tenerife, La Capella, Bilbaoarte, DosMares and Matadero. In her practice, she explores how images can access personal experience and serve as a hinge that articulates times, contexts and subjective experiences by experimenting with body and language.

Over the course of the school year, we offer an activity designed for groups of secondary-school students that revolves around exhibitions and focuses on generating meaningful experiences.

Our project seeks to establish a direct link between contemporary artistic practices and students with the aim of revitalising and livening up the museum's spaces. For this reason, we like to approach exhibitions as spaces for collective creation and research.

Taking this focus into account, we invite artists and creators to think with us about strategies to activate exhibition spaces. In this process, we seek to encourage curiosity and interest among students, as well as to promote collective creation. Our main purpose is to generate spaces for students to think critically. This encounter was designed on the basis of a desire to share knowledge, know-how, experiences and to debate on the content of the exhibitions together.

To hoist our own flag on the façade of the museum for one minute. To invent names and colour palettes with which to build the landscape of Móstoles at exactly 12:30 at night. Bringing our bodies very, very close together until we become one big rock. Meditating on the roof of the building and imagining the sunset-coloured evening sky. These are some of the things that the students who visited the museum last year experienced.

In the classroom of the CA2M Museum, there are numerous ceramic pieces that were moulded by the groups that visited us in 2022. With great care, Mr Mateo baked each of them in his school kiln. There, they released all their water, which evaporated and dispersed into the air of Móstoles. The textbooks say that when hydrogen bonds are replaced by stronger, shorter oxygen bonds, the clay shrinks and cannot be reused. That it will never be mud again.

We invite pre-school and primary school classes to take part in collective action to imagine an answer to this question. What can we make with that mud? Leave school and come to the museum in order to touch, change, break, make noise and soften.

Adriana Reyes (anthropologist and creator in the field of living arts) and Mateo Añover (teacher and director of CEIP Antonio Hernández, ceramicist and basketball enthusiast) know a lot about this. We have invited them to design this workshop in which children will turn small things into a new creation where the body, collective action and other contemporary artistic forms will be put into practice to turn something small into something extraordinary.

Last year, with the help of Costa Badía and Julia Ayerbe, we thought long and hard about the entrance door of the CA2M Museum.  About how it could and could not be opened, about the implicit rules behind that, about the illusion of architectural neutrality and on how discourses on inclusive education are almost always empowering and celebratory. That door is now accessible, and we want to think slowly, without taking anything for granted, about what inclusion really means in a museum, in the history of these practices and whether it is still possible to broaden their imaginary.  

This course will focus on the concept of easy reading, i.e. a method that brings together a set of guidelines and recommendations regarding the drafting of texts, the design and layout of documents and the validation of their comprehensibility, aimed at making information accessible to people with reading comprehension difficulties. 

Far from taking for granted their meaning-translating intention, for example of works of art, we wish to make both the information we provide and the mediator’s role more complex. We will think about these norms and highlight what lies behind the eloquent, closed discourses of some bodies over others. Together, we will open up new ways of understanding and simultaneously standing up for what is not understood.