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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. 

Our interest in these temporary encounters is to focus on the construction of knowledge through experience, rather than on the transmission of knowledge. We will start from the viewers’ point of view and how they see art at present. This will allow us to turn this time into a space for encounter in which the participants are not objects receiving an education, but subjects who collectively develop a critical discourse on contemporary works of art. In this way, visits will focus on a limited number of works in order to give rise to a more profound and open reflection, thus avoiding the more superficial exhibition itinerary and the idea of a single discourse. 

In recent years, the department has been working together with the educational community at Federico García Lorca CEIP. This experience has allowed us to rethink the ways in which relationships are established between the school and the museum. We are aware of the importance of creating a working group to develop innovative practices related to demanding, committed and long-lasting art education.

This school year, we will continue to investigate together through the Artist at Work Here programme, in which artists carry out a project in collaboration with the school community: teachers, pupils and families.

Given the phasing out of art education in formal education, it seems essential to us to continue to carry out these projects in educational institutions as tools with which to confront the prevailing attitudes. One of the basic aims of this project is to reflect on the power of the long-term projects carried out by artists to affect us. In this sense, we are interested in investigating how artists can affect the educational institution and, conversely, how educational institutions, state schools in particular, can give back to artists and the very education department in terms of experience.

This year, Belén Rodríguez will be the artist invited to carry out a project with the pupils of Federico García Lorca CEIP in Móstoles.

Last year, together with the boys and girls who reside at the Móstoles Children’s Home, fantasised about making a home inside our own tree house. We imagined what its shape would be like, what we would do inside it and what would happen around it.  

Some time later, in a conversation with the teachers at the Pablo Neruda UFIL, we saw the importance of learning by doing, and we assessed the need to turn educational spaces into places where real-life projects can be put into practice. We then thought it would be exciting to involve the Carpentry Department at the college in the construction of the house imagined by that group of children. 

We at the education department like to think that we can all take part in the construction of the world around us, so in January we will begin a process of collaboration with both groups to conceive, design and make this powerful image possible. 

For this purpose, we invited the designer Curro Claret to activate and guide us through this process. A long-distance dialogue that aims to rethink the idea of home and expand the concept of home and family. This creative process will be completed in early summer with the installation of the little house in the garden of the children’s home. 

Curro Claret. As a designer, Curro Claret’s interest lies in how people can participate in defining and building their environment by making use of their circumstances in a balanced and respectful way. His work often involves connecting a particular project with different groups of people. 

Last year CA2M started working with the EnterArte teachers’ group. The collaboration gave rise to a workshop exploring the interrelationship between school and museum which exceeded all expectations. This year the project will continue experimenting with the mysterious; an activity inviting us to let ourselves be carried along and discover the space of the museum, paying particular attention to minimum detail, to little things and what normally goes unnoticed.

"Let’s get soaked by a wave, aahh!" is a project working with ideas of transformation, art education and aesthetic play. It is a workshop-parcours-action in which we will experiment with different media, materials and spaces at CA2M for artistic expression.

Anyone turning up to this event will actively generate new narratives with the artworks and spaces at the museum, will compose and decompose, and play. But above all else, they will look at art from a totally different perspective, from childhood. We will imagine new ways and messages to arrive at these new collective narratives and imaginaries.

EnterArte is a group of teachers who work with different areas of education. Its work investigates how to bring art into their respective fields of education. Its mission is to rethink through the filter of art, to take a look at teaching from the optic of contemporary art practice and the relationship between school and museum. Art that reaches out and makes us think and act.