educacion.ca2m@madrid.org

Reading books by the pool, a special summer edition, making books that can survive a day at the swimming pool, reading underwater, wearing diving goggles to read, a book for applying sun cream, a sudoku puzzle book, a book for fanning yourself, a book for topping up your tan, a book for looking intriguingly intellectual on the lawn, a book for shielding yourself from the sun...

What is a book? What is a library? What does it mean to publish? And does any of this have anything to do with summer? We think it does.

For four days, we will transform the museum and its surroundings into a laboratory for editorial creation and bibliographic reflection. We will explore the practice of making books, reflect on the relationship between books and summer, and collectively publish and create a small library to see us through the warmer months.

As we do every summer, we invite you to join this workshop led by Conchi Tabares and Iria Pero, two creators whose work centres on self-publishing and the fanzine universe.

Conchi Tabares (2000) is an artist, researcher and designer. Her work focuses primarily on reading as a hybrid concept that extends beyond literature into other formats, and on the ways literary forms are transformed when opened up to alternative modes of reading. Language, chance and attentiveness to everyday phenomena are among the elements that currently shape her practice. Since 2022, she has co-coordinated Pichi Fest, a self-managed transfeminist fanzine festival, together with fellow zinesters, and many of her zines can be found on her Instagram profile, @_conchipcion. She studied Fine Arts and Comprehensive Design and Image Management at Rey Juan Carlos University, and is currently completing an MA in Art Research and Creation at Complutense University of Madrid. 

Iria Pero (2001) is an arts mediator and visual artist. Iria's principal interest lies in working with discarded materials and exploring the notions of waste, residue and noise in contemporary culture through a variety of published formats. A graduate in Fine Arts from Complutense University of Madrid, Iria is currently studying for an MA in Contemporary Art History and Visual Culture. Iria publishes fanzines under the name Peromedapereza. Iria also regularly runs self-publishing workshops and keeps a small fanzine library inside a dollhouse. Currently, Iria coordinates Index(a)1.1, an amateur fanzine cataloguing group at the Marcablanca community library.

What would a verbena (summer fair) shared with the city's birds look like?

What if, for one afternoon, we stopped watching them from below and invited them to celebrate with us?

We invite you to come and find out for yourselves: to share the verbena with our winged neighbours. We will be joined by Lidia Toga, who will help us to discover more about the rich world of urban birdlife. She knows these inhabitants of the skies and rooftops inside out, and will help us to understand their ways of being, moving and gathering.

Perhaps we should begin by looking up. Swifts, forever in motion, trace a rapid, collective dance across the sky that sets the tempo. They may encourage us to move with them, to follow that impulse alongside the groups Bailar el barrio and Baivén, flocking together, occupying space and discovering that movement can also be a way of belonging.

Between flights, we will build our own nests, inspired by the communal weaver bird that visited the preschool and primary workshops alongsid Adriana Reyes y Goya Batalla. Together, we will create collective shelters: shared spaces like the huge nests of monk parakeets, those living structures where there is always someone nearby, company and someone with whom to share things.

And, like magpies, we will be drawn to all things shiny and bright. Small treasures may appear: bits of paper that catch the light, found objects, fragments whose meaning changes when viewed together. The verbena will be that, too: a chance to pause for a moment and see things from a different perspective.

If at any time we need to slow down, we can pause Pompa y las familias, who have been exploring ways of sharpening the senses: listening more slowly, looking more closely, observing that pigeon from the windowsill, following the magpie in flight, noticing how things change when we truly pay attention.

There will, of course, be a shared spread—delightfully chaotic and generously abundant, just as it should be. Crumbs here and there; food passed around, changing hands, appearing and disappearing; eating on two feet while life unfolds around us.

Join us on 13 June at 5.30 pm to flutter, flock and chatter together as we celebrate the end of the school year.

All kinds of birds, families, and creatures of the earth and sky are welcome.

This verbena will be guided as a collective flight by Lidia Toga, an artist specialising in illustration, painting and muralism; Baiven, the collective formed by the dancers, choreographers and cultural mediators Alba Sáenz-López Aumente and Mar Sáenz-López Aumente; with Adriana Reyes, an anthropologist and creator in the field of live arts; Gregoria Batalla Batalla, a teacher at Zaleo nursery school, historian and provocateur in the art of education; and POMPA, a collective project for cultural management, curating and artistic creation led by Mara Sannia and Irene Aguilera Martín, whose practices intertwine to shape a shared territory of listening, play and transformation.

The Place of Unique Creatures will be a four-day summer workshop running from 30 June to 3 July for children aged 6 to 12 who would like to join us in imagining and creating a place of their own.

Sometimes we imagine bodies with wings, shimmering skin, enormous legs or the bodies of sea animals... Creatures that hide beneath stones, that sleep in caves, that crawl, float, leap or change shape. What if we could invent a being of our own? How would it move? What sounds would it make? What would it feel like to the touch?

The Place of Unique Creatures offers a space in which participants can explore using their bodies, movements and imaginations, discovering new sensations and new ways of being in the world.

As always, we will start from the idea of a shared refuge: an intimate space built together as an act of care and imagination in relation to the outside world. We want to think of these places as territories where we can invent alternative ways of living together and imagining collectively.

Through play, fantasy and shared adventure, we will set off on a journey towards new places and new possibilities. We will engage all five senses, bringing out the creature that lives inside each of us. Who says such creatures only exist in fairy tales? After all, isn’t the reality we inhabit magical enough in itself?

Along the way, we will create our own masks and use fabrics, paint and a range of materials to transform the space into a collective dreamscape where new forms of life and coexistence can appear. Through movement and theatrical creation, we will gradually compose a fantastical form of dance theatre populated by singular creatures.

Little by little, the group will build a living, dreamlike landscape: a community of unique creatures creating their own ecosystem, customs, hiding places and stories. A place where they can pretend to be something else and perhaps discover new ways of being together.

Chimenea de dos mujeres girando is a collective founded by Jara Arellano and Zoe Guidotti, artists and dancers who will facilitate the workshop through dance, bodily exploration and improvisation.

While dance lies at the heart of their practice, they see art as a hybrid territory where movement, literature, film, painting, photography and theatre coexist, nourishing their work and helping them to create distinctive worlds of their own. Their practice occupies a space bordering on play, imagination and collective creativity, eschewing academic conventions in favour of creating receptive spaces where the body can transform, invent and dream. Their principal aim is to make dance accessible to all and create safe environments where people can connect through freedom, attentive listening and the absence of judgement.

Have you ever stopped to think about how the bonds between people are manifested? Friendship, family and romantic relationships, needs and plans, desire... The emotional fabric is packed with feelings and concepts that become invisible lines leading and connecting us, constantly tightening and slackening, sometimes without us even noticing.

On this occasion we propose to enrich the research project Un juego de cuerdas y sus 12 leyes [A String Game and Its 12 Laws] with a collective game dynamic in which we’ll explore these and other bonds in a palpable, sensory way through knots and links.

We invite you to get tangled up with us and let go of the rope with the artist and researcher Inés Sorlat, who will use her practice to move the strings. Thus begins Intermittences, with the focus on what is there but might not always be there, on what is tightened but might also slacken.

Inés Sorlat (Madrid, 1993) is a multidisciplinary artist and Audiovisual Communication graduate of the Carlos III University in Madrid. Her work combines audiovisual narrative, installation and sewing, investigating the bonds between people and the invisible laws that uphold them. This exploration led to Un Juego de Cuerdas y sus 12 leyes, a series of twelve conceptual installations that reflect on relationships as a single interconnected system.

In 2025 she presented the first two pieces, Ley 8 and Ley 11, and she is currently developing the following works in the series, visually representing the system and its strings, and, one by one, reinterpreting their laws.

Donde Continúan las Cosas is a group formed by past participants of our programmes for young people, united by their interest in culture, art and community work. The project aims to redefine relationships with the museum, fostering the self-management of the group members and involving them in the definition of programmes for young people.

FUGA is a space where we continue to promote autonomy, exploration and collective undertaking. We don't impose anything here and there are no closed hierarchies: the group members design the programme together.

After a first year of sharing, experimenting and learning—a year of discovering how difficult but how rewarding it is to create a genuinely collective space—the group embarks on this new phase with a clear aim: to create their own podcast.

The podcast will be a tool for engaging with the museum’s programmes and exhibitions, but also for looking beyond them. It will enable us to map the contemporary art scene, interview artists and curators, visit spaces, chat with cultural agents and make our own voice heard in what is happening right now.

We want FUGA to be a place where we can continue adding to a collective archive, where we can explore current initiatives together, formulate theories, ask questions and continue to engage with the museum from the perspective of our own interests and languages.

We’ll meet twice a week during the year in a friendly, horizontal and experimental setting to design the podcast, record episodes, explore topics, invite people and create a project that is truly ours.

The shelter, retreating to the shelter 
the cave, the cave
the sound box between the shelter walls
the acoustics of the drawings
there where it sounds
we’ve been here for eight years and never sung a full song 

Beyond the end we have never sung
of those lost to the river
from the river to sea
cocorococo

Beyond the urgency-attention
uncertain-subtle-unfinished-unspeakable-invisible
attention intention
being in the phase, in the 3rd phase, not of autonomy but of self-management 
corococo coco cocorococuuuuuuuu

Beyond a new gentleness
that must be invented 
becoming a body of affectations
a beast of a thousand heads with a thousand tongues
reemerges in the shelter of the cave

An amateur choir is a creative project in which any kind of voice is welcome to participate. Every other Thursday, we do our own research sessions as well as sessions with artists who work with voice and listening.

Session dates of An Amateur Choir 2026

15 January / 29 January / 12 February / 26 February / 12 March / 26 March / 9 April / 23 April / 7 May / 21 May / 4 June / 18 June / 1 October / 15 October / 29 October / 5 November / 19 November / 3 December / 17 December.

Those who have come in the past:

An Amateur Choir has featured Sonia Megías, Itziar Okariz, Jaume Ferrete, María Salgado and Fran MM Cabeza de Vaca, Rocío Márquez, Alma Söderberg, Ainara Lagardon, Jhana Beat, Juan G. Araque (Juan Dresán) and Lolita Versache, Luz Prado, Los Torreznos, Makiko Kitago, Julián Mayorga, Agnès Pe, Paloma Carrasco, Anto Rodríguez, Elisa C. Martín, Elena Murcia Pinto with Marina Peralta Murcia, Inma Marín with Jon Cañal and Tania Arias Winogradow with Milo-Andrey Ulises, Rolando San Martín, Amalia Fernández, Elena Córdoba, Raquel G. Ibáñez, Alex Reynolds, Black Tulip, tacoderaya, Mónica Valenciano, Ruth Abellán and Arturo Moya, Ojo Último, Monserrat Palacios and Fátima Miranda, Sole Parody, Enrico Dau Yang Wey, Coco Moya, Veza Fernández, Patricia Leguina, Jesús Burrola, Noela Covelo, Stina Force, Los Cramps (Nilo+Francisco), Ángela Segovia, Eddi Circa + raxet1, E1000, El Gato with Jotas, Nilo Gallego, Tavi Gallart, Hijas de Yocasta, Amaia Bono and Damián Montesdeoca, Piccola, Bea Narcoleptica and Elan d’Orphium.