actividades.ca2m@madrid.org

On Wednesday 12 February Museo CA2M presents Swiftly Arose and Spread Around Me: Interventions for Sticky Thinking (Act 2), launching the second part of the curatorial research undertaken by Sergi Álvarez Riosalido within the framework of the seventh edition of the Encura Residency programme. La Cuarta Piel, Sandra Mar, Maya Pita-Romero, Laura Ramírez Ashbaugh and María Rojas will take part in the inauguration of this research process.

Encura is a research residency programme that aims to promote, expand and complexify curatorial research processes by intertwining the artistic contexts of Barcelona and Madrid, encouraging and enabling curatorial research that doesn’t result in conventional exhibition projects. The programme is co-led by  HANGAR, Museo CA2M, Casa de Velázquez and hablarenarte.

The second act of this curatorial research project is conceived as a performative and reflective gathering inspired by the study of sticky thinking and the diverse potential of slime as a political, ecological and affective concept.  The event will feature a series of interventions on key themes such as the mediation of viscosity in human and more-than-human relationships and the radical connection between bodies, fluids and environments.

Sticky thinking is developed as a conceptual and sensory framework that blurs the boundaries between bodies, objects and environments, exploring the dynamics of connection and transformation. Drawing on the intimate contact described by Walt Whitman in a poem that inspires the title of the project, sticky thinking takes saliva as a medium which, as it flows and spreads, unites the human with the more-than-human, the scale of our body with the infinitely large and the infinitely small.

Danez Smith amplifies this perspective through poetry from a queer, racialised and HIV-positive standpoint, where fluids, as lubricants, activate an intimate practice while serving as a political metaphor for exchange and relation. Here, viscosity becomes a means to resist normativity and embrace a relational understanding of identities and bodies beyond imposed boundaries.

Authors like Karin Anna Pittman and Karen Barad also explore the sticky as a mediating element: connections “lubricated” by viscosity and stickiness are not merely links between pre-existing agents but generative forces of new, overflowing ways of being and knowing.

Sergi Álvarez Riosalido (Sabadell, 1992) is a researcher, curator and writer. He has a bachelor’s degree in Communication (UAB), a master’s degree in Comparative Studies in Art, Literature and Thought (UPF), a postgraduate diploma in Contemporary Thought (UCM), and a master’s degree in Contemporary Art Curating (Sorbonne Université Paris IV) thanks to a grant from “La Caixa”. He took part in year zero of the independent study programme “Organism: Art in Applied Critical Ecologies” organised by TBA21. With a special interest in curatorial practice as a collective process of co-creation, his research focuses on themes such as the subversive dimension of love, desire and tenderness, and the ways of creating community and the materialities that underlie the present.

He has taken part in exhibition and research projects at institutions such as the CCCB (Barcelona), Jeu de Paume (Paris), Centre Pompidou (Paris) and La Casa Encendida (Madrid), among others. He is the author of the monograph on the experimental filmmaker Jonas Mekas, titled No aceptaremos las ataduras (Brumaria, 2017), and he has contributed to publications like Found Footage Magazine, Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema, Exit-express, A*Desk and others.

La Cuarta Piel is a community of practices that translates the extractivist processes that sustain human life in cities. It does this through hedonistic situations that materialise the ecological relationships of these complex processes to assimilate them with the human scale. This exercise of intermediation facilitates the communication between knowledge, species and territories. The collective contributes to publishing projects and initiatives dedicated to territorial transformation and cultural mediation. Together or separately, the members of La Cuarta Piel have taken part in the Vienna Biennale (2017), the Venice Biennale (2018), the Quito Architecture Biennale (2022) and the Krakow Biennale (2017, first prize).  They have also exhibited at Negre (Las Cigarreras, 2021), designed and produced ephemeral installations for A Cel Obert (2020), Insólit Festival (2019), Galeria de Arquitectura Porto, HANGAR Lisbon and Medialab-Prado and stage sets for Productores de Sonrisas and Sorolla Producciones. Their educational backgrounds range from UPM (Madrid), UA (Alicante), UCM (Madrid) and ETSAB (Barcelona) to PUC (Chile), UNAM (Mexico), Tongji (Shangai), UWE (Bristol) and the Accademia di elle Arti de Venezia, and they have taught at the ETSAM, Universidad Diego Portales and UA.

Sandra Mar (Valencia, 1995) is an artist working in the field of sculpture. Her practice revolves around this medium and the line as immediate expressive processes, addressing a manner of construction in which the material dialogues with the body it touches. In her work she reflects on contemporary emotional and affective themes, which she links to the quasi-romantic relationship established with the matter. She has held solo shows at Galería Rosa Santos (València) and has taken part in group exhibitions at Pluto (València), Galería Rosa Santos (València), Institut Français (Madrid), La Casona (Reinosa, Santander), IVAM (València), Galería Fran Reus (Palma de Mallorca), Taca (Palma de Mallorca), Zape (Alboraia, València), Centro 14 (Alicante) and Art Nit (Campos, Mallorca). She was involved in the sixth edition of the Residencias Artísticas Reinosa, the 2024 Space Grant and the Programa Confluències, IVAM (València). She won the Makma Acquisition Award at Abierto València 2024 and the Casa de Indias Acquisition Award at CerArtmic 2024.

Maya Pita-Romero (Madrid, 1999) is a visual artist who uses installation and sculpture to investigate the transformations of ecosystems and their link to bodily processes. She explores intimacy through monstrosity, the abject, fear, tenderness and delicacy, creating new imaginaries and forms of care through fictions in which our bodies and nature are intertwined with traditional wisdom. Her works are constructed from organic elements and materials that change, alter and evolve over time, like plants and textiles which, through components like latex, acquire different flexibilities and formal possibilities, highlighting the similarities between human bodies and the plant world.

My name is Laura Ramírez Ashbaugh (Madrid, 1988) and I’m a choreographer, dancer, educator and DJ living and working between Madrid and Amsterdam. I hold a degree in Physical Theatre from RESAD and am currently taking the DAS Choreography master’s course in Amsterdam. I have previously studied dance and choreography at the Martha Graham School (New York), SNDO (Amsterdam) and PAF (France).

I am/was a member of the Mediation and Education Department at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía but I am currently conducting my research and practice concerning the museum space in relation to dance at the IVAM and Galería NF. My practice involves dance, sound and choreography. My practice focuses on liminal spaces, sound and feeling with the beat. I use images and fiction to think about choreographic methods and to explore languages of movement that are overlooked in the forms we already know in order to create intermediate spaces that may give rise to new logics that help us to understand the body’s perceptual and intuitive qualities. Right now, I’m totally obsessed with hormones as a choreographic practice and tool, and with horror images.

María Rojas (Zaragoza 1987) is an artist and researcher whose work uses photographic images to create installations that explore different types of materialities, reverting digital or fluid processes to textures and forms. Her work focuses on the limits of language and space, transcending the boundaries between digital and natural. In this succession of boundaries, gesturalism occupies a prominent position in her work as a vehicle for presenting fictionalised spaces through observation and change, and through small actions that help us to narrate new realities. She has a diploma in Sculptural Techniques from the Escuela de Arte de Zaragoza, a degree in Fine Art from UCLM and the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana, and a master’s degree in the Development of Photographic Projects from Blank Paper, Madrid. She has worked in Berlin as an arts administrator and as a photographer for the Ministry of Culture in Praia, Cape Verde. As a speaker, she has given talks on creative processes at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, she worked as a curator for EXP.20 Barcelona and ArtConnect, and she directed the Cyclo art and music festival, winner of an Injuve award. She is currently developing her next project at Casa Velázquez in Madrid.

In collaboration with:

Our migrants’ suitcases are filled with twenty-three kilos of life per crossing. Overweight again? What do you carry when you go? When you come back? Yerba mate to while away the time? Coca leaf to blow on God? How much does a house weigh? Did you squirrel away enough money to bring your dog? Was the skin of the soursop still bristly when you unpacked it? What does your baggage smell like? In these four sessions, we’ll be pulp and seed, green and travel, tenderness and bark to recount the southerly-to-southerly winds that blow over the invented territory of the diaspora. Four encounters to open the soursop (not the melon) and use storytelling to explore the interstices of all our creatures/children.

We invite you to journey through this writing laboratory made up of four interconnected sessions led by Sudakasa: Lucrecia Masson, Gabriela Wiener, Chinî and Hildy Quintanilla Ocampo (Q´inti- Colibrí).

The workshop dates are:

• Friday 29 November 6:30–8:30 pm
• Saturday 30 November 12–2 pm
• Friday 13 December 6:30–8:30 pm
• Saturday 14 December 12–2 pm

Participants must attend three of the four sessions to earn an attendance certificate.

Sudakasa is a community writing and creation space based on migrant experiences; it is a refuge-home and artistic residence that has come to cover our lack of a ‘people’, because our people are across the sea. We have re-appropriated this parcel of olive and almond trees and grapevines from insult and turned it into body, identity and memory of the diasporas so together we can weave other stories of resistance that confront the violences against those from down under.

Lucrecia Masson Córdoba. With impurity as a principle, she is a writer, artist and researcher whose main topics of inquiry are bodies, animalities and other-than-humans. From an anti-colonial stance, she works in different artistic registers, primarily experimenting with writing. What interests her in theory is imagination, and she willingly believes that we cannot think without the body. She published Epistemología rumiante (2017) and Escrituras rumiantes. Cuerpo, exceso, animalidad (2022) and has participated in numerous anthologies. She is a member of the Colectivo Ayllu, with whom she has published Devuélvannos el oro (2018) and participated in events like the Sydney Biennial (2020 and the 35th São Paulo Biennial (2023).

Gabriela Wiener. She is a Peruvian writer and journalist living in Madrid. She has published the books Sexografías, Llamada perdida, Nueve Lunas, Huaco retrato and Dicen de mí and the poetry collections Ejercicios para el endurecimiento del espíritu and Una pequeña fiesta llamada eternidad. Her first stories were published in the narrative journalism magazine Etiqueta Negra. She was a columnist for The New York Times in Spanish and the editor-in-chief of Marie Claire España and has contributed to many international media. She publishes a weekly column for publico.es. She won the National Journalism Award in Peru with a report on a case of gender violence. She is the creator of different performances that she has staged with her family. She wrote and starred in the play Qué locura enamorarme yo de ti. She is a member of@Sudakasa, a collective migrant art and writing project. Undiscovered, the English translation of her novel Huaco retrato, was a finalist for the 2024 International Booker Prize and PEN America. @gabrielawiener

Chinî. She was born in Ka'aguasu, Paraguay, in 1987 during the Alfredo Stroessner dictatorship. She is a poet and marica 108, studied biology and researches frogs and toads from Piribebuy. She migrated to Madrid in 2019, following her mother and sister. She has been a Guaraní Jopará speaker since childhood and adores tereré and mbeju. Professionally, she is currently an arborist and keeps watch over the El Pardo forests in Tres Cantos. She is working on her poetry collection Corpus infecciosa/ 30 comprimidos/ suspensión oral, which examines the wound of HIV-AIDS, migratory sorrow and the traumas of a healthy-ill body. She thinks that the virus has come to her body to rummage through her past and heals it with plant-based remedies. She has been dreaming in Guaraní from the Paraguayan city of Ka'aguasu surrounded by soy harvests and the absence of her mother.

Hildy Quintanilla Ocampo (Q´inti- Colibrí). She is a stage creator, poet, willakuq (storyteller), researcher of Andean theatricalities and oralities and a Qoyllirit’i pilgrim as part of the Quispicanchi nation. In Madrid, she is developing the self-managed Arguedas, Oraliteca Migrante project, which brings Andean and Latin America orality and literature and teaches the Quechua language via Escuelachallay, my little Quechua school in Madrid, as practices that aim to strengthen migrant identities and intercultural dialogue in Spain.

Immerse yourself in this sensory experience that creates a map of memories in dialogue with the Sol Calero exhibition. Memory guides us via the relationship between fruit, their scents, their textures and their flavours, as a fragile, expansive territory where the footprints of our memories reverberate, catalysed by sensory stimuli that summon the latent and its resonances. In this workshop, smell and taste become the thresholds that transport us to encapsulated instants, bringing emotions and experiences suspended time into the present.

We will recreate a group picnic that is offered as an immersion in the personal and collective imaginary, a living tissue in which memory is rewritten based on the direct relationship with the fruit. It is an experience that connects with the artist Sol Calero’s Pica-Pica installation, where we will transform memories into wishes, requests and offerings so we can together imagine possible futures.

Guided workshop for audiences age 6 and over.

Xisela García Moure has been putting agricultural and sustainability techniques into practice in the city for over ten years. A member of the Break the Circle Transition Institute and a resident of Móstoles, she is familiar with our city’s possibilities and interests. An expert in organic agriculture and permaculture, she has worked on different farms and urban agriculture projects, and this year she is aiming to put her knowledge into practice by committing herself to a greener Móstoles that is more aware of the town’s needs.

Dates:

• Wednesday 27 November 6:30–8:30 pm
• Wednesday 4 December 6:30–8:30 pm
• Wednesday 11 December 6:30–8:30 pm

Madrid has a long and little-known Islamic legacy which is intertwined with the city’s history in a way that challenges the political and media discourses that present Islam and Muslims as unwanted, recent foreign arrivals. Madrid was founded in the eleventh century with the mixed name of Maŷrit and is the only current European capital with Islamic roots.

Its first history was written in Arabic, as were the names of its first known inhabitants. For 220 years, Madrid belonged to the broad Arab-Islamic geographic and cultural space that extended from the Duero River to the Sahara Desert, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Indus River. After being conquered and incorporated to the Kingdom of Castile in the late eleventh century, Madrid still had an Islamic presence for 500 more years through its Mudejar, Morisco and slave minorities.

This historical legacy is barely known because the history of Madrid has been recounted in light of its status as the urbs regia, the seat and symbolic embodiment of a power that has been presented as essential and exclusively Catholic and European, which has consequently tended to erase the material and symbolic traces of a past that was considered unsuitable. However, unexpected, subtle phantasmagorias of this past, both tangible and intangible, still exist in Madrid today and even inhabit the icons of Madrid’s identity.

This activity suggests a tour around different spaces of memory to engage in a reflection on the history and memory of Madrid in relation to concepts like identity, alterity, mestizaje and diversity.

Wednesday 19 June. 6-8 pm. Free activity with advance registration. Capacity: 25 people.

Daniel Gil-Benumeya, 1970. He was raised between Rabat and Madrid in a family associated with the imagined and cross-border geography of southern Spain. His academic training is in the field of Arab and Islamic Studies, and outside the academy he was trained in the neighbourhood community of Lavapiés and other areas of Madrid. He is currently a professor in the Department of Linguistics and Oriental Studies at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and scientific coordinator of the Centro de Estudios de Madrid Islámico (CEMI), which is affiliated with the Fundación de Cultura Islámica (FUNCI). His main line of research involves a range of issues associated with the past and present of Islam and populations considered Muslim in Europe. He specifically examines the processes of constructing identity and alterity and the role played by social representations of history and memory in this construction.

María Us is a Guatemalan activist who was a guerilla member during Guatemala’s armed internal conflict between 1960 and 1996.

As the outcome of the partnership between her and the artist Ana Gallardo, we are presenting a play in the form of a biographical act which tells the story of a forest that is both the memory of land struggles and the community’s means of sustenance, in an attempt to disinhibit and publicise the resistance of several generations of female bodies violated by their family members and fellow political activists, too.

MARÍA US

I am a woman with K'iche' roots. I speak my native language. Ever since I remember, I’ve worked the land a lot. I went to primary school in my community. What I remember from primary school: most of the teachers were Latino and they would hit and punish us over anything. And they forced us to study or speak Spanish. I liked to play and run, and I imagined that when I was a bit older, I would go far from my family to study and teach the children of my village. Everything changed when the government of Guatemala began to damage and murder. That was my dream no more. I think that schools should not be enclosed; children should not be inside four walls; they should study in a place where they coexist with nature. Someday I’ll teach children.

Continuing with the line of work that got underway in 2014, El Cine Rev[b]elado is offering a series of activities around audiovisual performance and film’s interrelation with other disciplines. It is an examination of the cinematographic experience beyond the darkened room and the projected image, relating it and transforming it to activate an experience around the audiovisual that questions not only its own language but also its entire structure and conventional logistics.

On 9 February 2014, the first edition of El Cine Rev[b]elado got underway at the CA2M Museum. Ten years later, we are still examining the interrelation between film and other disciplines by proposing a dialogue that rebels against the conventions of traditional cinematography in a constant quest for new revelations that lead us to other places and activate critical thinking.

In this anniversary edition, we are suggesting a reflection on the image itself in terms of its presence and especially its absence, associating it with orality, the word, the text and gesture via four performances by artists who inquire into and work within these contemporary artistic practices.

In 2024, we celebrated one decade and six editions of El Cine Rev[b]elado along with the CA2M Museum and everyone who has attended it, turning this series into a benchmark within the live and performing arts in the Community of Madrid.

Curated by Playtime Audiovisuales (Enrique Piñuel Martín and Natalia Piñuel Martín).

PROGRAMME

Sunday 11 February 6:30 pm ǀ NON-IMAGE: A TALK ABOUT PERCEPTION ǀ David Bestué, Marta Azparren and Haize Lizarazu.

Sunday 18 February 6 pm ǀ WASHINGTON ǀ Matías Daporta.

Sunday 25 February 6:30 pm ǀ FORTY-SIX SECONDS ǀ Los Torreznos.

Sunday 3 March 6:30 pm ǀ THINGS SAID ONCE ǀ Esperanza Collado.

Note: Only the session on 18 February will begin at 6 pm.

Playtime Audiovisuals

This is a Madrid-based cultural management platform founded by Natalia Piñuel and Enrique Piñuel in 2007 which is devoted to contemporary artistic practices. They undertake curatorial projects for art centres and cultural institutions like the Espacio Fundación Telefónica, Azkuna Zentroa, MUSAC, Instituto Cervantes, Centro Cultural de España en México and Tabakalera. They have also worked as programmers for film and music festivals like (S8) Mostra de Cinema Periférico de A Coruña, Festival de Jóvenes Realizadores de Granada, Actual de Logroño and Experimenta Club de Madrid.

Their most prominent projects include ‘Visiones contemporáneas - últimas tendencias del cine y el vídeo en España’ (Contemporary visions – latest trends in film and video in Spain) at Domus Artium 2002 (DA2) in Salamanca since 2013; the multidisciplinary festival ‘She Makes Noise’ at Madrid’s La Casa Encendida since 2015, which disseminates the role of women and nonbinary identities in electronic music and audiovisual experimentation; and the performance biennial ‘El Cine Rev[b]elado’ at the Museo Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo in Móstoles since 2014. They co-founded ‘L.A. OLA’, the contemporary Spanish film festival sited in Los Angeles, New York and Mexico City from 2015 to 2018. They also worked as independent film distributors for twelve years. They regularly contribute to different media and work as teachers.