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Directed by: Carmen Aldama

“A new terrain where everyone is welcome, where education dresses up in its finery and science is fun. Every night the Universidad Popular will become a type of free and free-of-charge theatre of education,” wrote Blasco Ibáñez in the newspaper El Pueblo in January 1903. Blasco Ibañez founded the first people’s university in Valencia, which drew far greater numbers of attendees than the students enrolled in the official university. Now, in the present, we fantasise with the idea that the attendees of the “theatre of education” challenged the authority of the well-meaning teachers, who were devoured by popular wisdom. The photograph would have been taken moments before the storming of the rostrum. 

Following model of adult education centres, since 2008 the Museo CA2M has been running the People’s University programme as a space to reflect on the nature of art today. Over the years, the lectures given by art history and philosophy academics have gradually incorporated other forms of learning based on artistic practice, and artists have been invited to share their working methods and processes. The People’s University attendees have always participated vigorously in the discussions and played an active role in the sessions with the artists, to the extent that they have ultimately become the protagonists of the lecture series. For that reason, the research topic for the 2026 edition of the People’s University is the actual learning group that emerges and flourishes around the programme. A group that is always varied, genuine and fluctuating. 

Over the course of five sessions, we’ll experiment with insubordination, anonymity, collective authorship, resistance, radical confidence, power, cannibalism and other heroic fantasies with which to unleash popular energy. 

PROGRAMME

• Wednesday 22 April. THE ARTIST IS PRESENT. Javier Tirado Ocón 
• Wednesday 29 April. SEASON FINALE. Cuqui Jerez
• Wednesday 6 May. DEVOUR ME AGAIN. Aitana Cordero
• Wednesday 13 May. TEACHING THOSE WHO DON'T KNOW. Carmen Aldama
• Wednesday 20 May. GRAND FINALE. Ben Attia and María Moncada

“This year the biological cycle of the group begins with the chrysalis. Each workshop will focus on how we are developing from inside out or vice versa, exploring our resources as we discover them, inhabiting new places and getting ready to make—or already taking—the preliminary leap to our metamorphosis, our flight.

Phase 1: Observation
Phase 2: Experimentation and play
Phase 3: Creation
Phase 4: Breaking everything

Come and join us as we wait, or not, our way.

‘Nails and tacks’ is an activity for young people between ages 13 and 21 who want to discover new practices related to self-publishing and contemporary creation. On Fridays and weekends, we’ll run workshops and meet with artists, exploring our personal universes and searching for new ways of looking at everyday life through art. You can sign up for individual sessions or the whole series. All the sessions will be different.”

Quiosco Clandestino is a collective formed by Angie de la Lama and Leo D’Elio that emerged in 2020 at the height of the pandemic out of a reflection on the cultural circuits to which they both belonged. Its mission is to support artists and people interested in artistic creation while pursuing its own projects associated with self-publishing.

Angie de la Lama specialises in comics, illustration and low-budget film-making. She is also active in the field of cultural management, having created Skisomic Fest, the first fanzine festival in Seville, and film festivals like Euforia and Intima, held in Madrid. She combines her work as an artist and cultural manager with the development of educational projects for different institutions.

Leo D’Elio is an artist and cultural manager from Madrid. Using practices related to self-publishing, such as fanzines, comics and sound experimentation, his work revolves around the personal, everyday life and public space. He is a staunch defender of amateurism and doing things “badly”. He spent his formative years with the Museo CA2M “sub21” youth group and “Duchamp & Sons” of the Whitechapel Gallery in London before creating Quiosco Clandestino and Yina + Eol with Angie in 2020.
 

CALENDAR OF SESSIONS:

10 and 31 October

14 and 28 November 

12 December

“We’re back. We’re going to continue what we left unfinished and this time transform ourselves. We come as lost Amazons. Echoing in the air are the mythological polyphonies that generate this system of unequal relationships, those voices, symbols and images that don’t represent us. The narrative has been so, so, so successful that we’re still pushing the Boulder.

We wanted to kill the mother but we failed, so now we're going to save her. We might not achieve that goal either, but this time we’ll aim better. Although in our attempts to adapt ancestral myths to the new identities of the twenty-first century we might miss Diana’s mark.

Here, there and everywhere, through the centuries, they've stolen our narrative, even though it was all chaos in the beginning. Our journey has brought us to IthaCA2M. We're going to shut Telemachus’s mouth, we’re going to appropriate mythos for ourselves. Potatoes protest by whistling in the cruelty of the kitchen. Because now we know we’re either mad or bad, really bad or super-bad, or good, really good without nuances, one-dimensional. 

At our next meetings we’ll explore and interrogate the role of myths in every sense and in every aspect. We’ll reflect on the narratives that have shaped the construction of female subjectivity to challenge them and rebel against them. Magicians and priestesses, fiends, old women who used magic potions and spells, frequented cemeteries and could even fly. Persecuted and punished: was the imposed narrative in danger?

For witches Circe and Medea. Men’s fantasies, for good or for bad. Powerful witches, negative models for women’s conduct who also represented the antithesis of the chaste woman. Penelope would weave and un-weave, create and un-create. And so do we. We fall so often into the stereotypes that we hate and envy Helen.

Our Trojan Horse for destroying this imaginary will be literature and art, sister allies, the tools we’ll use to unravel ourselves. We’ll make room for popular traditions, other forms, in truth to explain the same thing. We’ll open Pandora’s box, or just for change we’ll leave Pandora free of boxes. The Apple is very good for whitening your teeth. We’re the mixture, result, product of Celtic, Roman and barbarian lands. Dehumanised, de- and human, perfect and imperfect, although they’ve screwed us alive and even dead. But from the mud new narratives have emerged with different voices and different airs. And we’ll (re-) embrace them to discuss and listen to each other in the midst of sounds, words and silences.”

The Daughters of Jocasta

PS. Jocasta committed suicide whereas Oedipus only gouged out his eyes. How unfair it all is. We put up with so much.

Who are we? The Daughters of Jocasta.

We’re called the Daughters of Jocasta because we like the name, because we’re all daughters, and because Jocasta was the mother (and wife) of Oedipus, who gave her so much pain (and pleasure).

We found the excuse for the name in Christiane Oliver's book The Children of Jocasta and appropriated it. It’s ours.

Four daughters: Rebeca Contador, Sandra Cabrera, Ángela Solano and Ana Isabel Fernández Álvarez.

We're the resistance of the Museo CA2M reading groups. But we've become more than the origin, we have our own voice. United by a love of talking and talking, of always mulling everything over from every angle.

NEXT SESSIONS

30 October

13 and 27 November

18 December

Going out on to the street to propose practices that alter the logical order of things; sticking chewing gum on the museum entrance to create a collective sculpture with the fingerprints of the all students; hanging their own flag on the museum facade (if only for a minute); and inventing ranges of colour to reconstruct the Móstoles landscape at precisely 12.30 noon.  

These are just some of the experiences in which students who have visited the Museo CA2M have engaged.  

During the school year we propose an experience for secondary and upper secondary students that will turn the museum into a space for creation, investigation and collective thinking.  

This year the activities will revolve around the Murky Waters exhibition by Inês Zenha, their first institutional solo show in Spain. Zenha explores queer identity, desire and vulnerability through installations, paintings and sculptures that invite us to rethink the body, fluidity and power structures.  

With this same focus, we have invited the artist Aicha Josefa Trinidad Gououi to help us design strategies to activate the exhibition spaces and generate meaningful experiences with the students. The aim is to establish a direct link between contemporary artistic practices and young people, encouraging critical thinking and discussion about topical social and cultural themes.  

What do we propose?  

• An encounter inspired by the desire to share knowledge, practices and experiences.  
• A space to imagine other ways of being together.  
• An opportunity to turn the museum into a laboratory, a stage, a shelter.  

Aicha Josefa Trinidad Gououi is a researcher and artist. Her work explores how first-person writing and lived experiences can become forms of knowledge. 

Just like the end of every school year, we are looking for a special way to kick off the summer. This year we’re inviting the artist Sara Manubens, who will suggest that we collectively create our own House Drag over the course of four days.

‘This workshop uses the tools of the art of drag as creative power for working with ourselves. I am suggesting an open, sensitive space where all bodies, concerns, fantasies, fears and illusions have a place, with the goal of sharing. We want to share who we are, who we want to be, what makes us uneasy and what we reject. And we will transform all of this into artistic material. How? Through drag art technologies: lip syncing, choreography, exaggerated theatre, makeup, humour and vibrant emotions. We’ll do it through friendship and being together, because that is House Drag: a horizontal space of mutual support to make life happier.’

This summer, the museum is turning into a space designed to combat the heat just like it’s always been done: where it’s cool, with no hurry and in good company. Inspired by those perennial places where idleness is fine, this project is turning the museum into a summer refuge where you can simply exist.

La Fresquera is a place where time stands still a little, where you can come read, play cards, talk… or simply do nothing. A place where the cool air is appreciated, like when you used to sit in your doorway in good company with a pitcher of water next to you.

La Fresquera isn’t an activity; it’s an attitude. It’s opening the museum’s doors to turn it into that courtyard, square or porch where you love to be. We’ve prepared a series of comfortable, quiet spaces full of plants where you can feel at home.

We care for your plants. Watering Can Initiative

We know that many people go on holiday in summer and don’t know what to do with their plants. At La Fresquera, we are thinking about them, too, and that’s why we are launching the Watering Can Initiative. From 25 June to 15 September, the museum is offering to care for the plants of the residents of Móstoles. All you have to do is fill out a form to choose the days you want to leave us your plants and tell us how to care for them, and we’ll do the rest: find the best spot for them, water them, even talk to them if needed… Here we treat them like they’re one of the family.