educacion.ca2m@madrid.org

Witnessing the End is a programme of outings to places where terminal events happen, like the end of a motorway, the mountains of Madrid and the botanical garden. It is also a lecture on the impossibility of conservation at the CA2M Museum. At these springtime gatherings, we will think collectively about the stories told in our culture about denouements, resisting death and the beauty of disappearing as we hover air-borne over the precipice in the car together.

This People’s University programme, targeted at anyone interested in contemporary artistic practices, expands the concept of knowledge conveyance to introduce contemporary art, and it heads out in search of shared experiences that make us think as artists both inside and outside the museum.

PROGRAM 

APRIL 10. Keeping out the cold. Excursion to the Guadarrama Mountains. 

24 APRIL. De-veiling the Collection. Lecture and visit to the CA2M Museum warehouses.

Hache, i, jota, ka, 
ele, eme, ene, a, 
que si tú no me quieres, 
otro niño me querrá.

[‘H, I, J, K,

L, M, N, A

If you don’t love me

Another boy will.’

Spanish children’s song called El Patio de mi Casa]

Children’s songs serve as the common thread of memories, generations and lives separated in space and time. They are clearly meant to be fun, but they can also be educational. What do children’s folk songs teach us? What reality do they reflect? We are not trying to constrain creativity but instead aim to analyse what the lyrics of these songs from another era say, a time when girls were frightened away by spiders, men put their wives in a pumpkin shell, and ladies trotted but gentlemen galloped.[AS1] 

We’ll mix elderly people’s memories and young people’s intuition to turn those perennial children’s songs into songs of our lives today by changing the lyrics, trying out new instruments and inventing a dance for any age. We’ll have fun with the entire family as we use music and play to help us reconsider those intergenerational tunes and make them more ours, more open, more contemporary, in a bid to give them many more years of life.

PROGRAMME

FEBRUARY

Saturday 17 February from 4:30—6:30 pm

Saturday 24 February from 11am—1 pm

MARCH

Saturday 9 March from 4:30—6:30 pm

Saturday 16 March from 11am—1 pm

NOTE:  We recommend this activity for children aged 5 and older. However, any younger children in your group/family are more than welcome. We will try to adapt the pace to all participants.

In 2016, Atilio González and Elia Maqueda set up a group (Ruiseñora) and had a daughter, and these two events have largely determined their lives since then. They have published several records on the Raso Estudio label, a mix of electronic and traditional music, the project’s hallmark and one of the first in the new line of work to revive folklore by looking at the past in order to face the future. They have held family concerts with audiences and often hold concerts for their own family (they always compose, rehearse and record at home). They have also coordinated workshops and artistic projects in museums like the Reina Sofía and the Vostell Malpartida.

In this programme, we are inviting different artistic collectives who are families to imagine the shared space where they can pool their creative processes and interests and create together with other people, a space where age and skill don’t matter, a new space-time where you can share with your people, neighbours, chosen families, grandparents, grandchildren.

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.